‘Coming to Terms’ with Reconciliation - Working Paper Library
Website: www.global.wisc.edu/reconciliation/
Between Religious Visions and Secular Realities:
(Dia)logology and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation
John Hatch, Ph.D.
Department of Communication
University of Dubuque
E-mail: [email protected]
In (re)making what is, somehow converting one
state of affairs or mind to another, reconciliation
opposes the way in which we establish the essence
(the exclusivity) of things, challenges the ways
that we justify the value of such distinctions, and
endeavors to dismantle those modes of definition
that legitimize identitarian violence. Its meaning
pushes our capacity for definition and plays with
the limits of identity. – Erik Doxtader1
harmony), and the restoration of human agency to transcend
and forgive (or not) the perpetrators of heinous wrongs that
rend the lives of victimized groups and the fabric of a society. Because the aftermath of gross human rights violations
leaves such values in unbearable tension with each other (or
simply torn asunder), it is little surprise when religious leaders and thinkers emerge as key voices in the rhetoric of reconciliation, for humans frequently come to terms with suffering – and questions of ultimate meaning or value – by way
of religious narratives, images, and practices. However, even
as such voices make crucial contributions to reconciliation
on various levels,3 their presence is problematic for pluralistic societies and secular political organs.
As it defies definition, reconciliation dances around disciplinary divides. Drawing attention in anthropology and
social psychology, sociology and psychiatry, conflict and
The paradigmatic example of this sacred-secular tension
is, of course, Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s role as the champion of reconciliation in South Africa. Tutu was preaching
reconciliation as the much-needed, nonviolent bane of apartheid long before the negotiated transition and the creation
of the TRC. Nearly a decade after presenting the Report of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Nelson Mandela, Tutu continues to promote reconciliation as the way
forward for societies wounded by protracted or intractable
conflict.4 For Tutu, reconciliation is a theologically developed expression of ubuntu, the much-heralded, traditional
peace studies, philosophy and rhetoric, political science, history, and theology, reconciliation crosses and troubles their
borders. Following Erik Doxtader, one may take this multidisciplinarity as evidence that reconciliation is, above all, a
rhetorical concept.2 It is also an inescapably ethical project,
even if the pragmatism of politics muddies its moral waters
in carving a course toward the common good. Reconciliation’s rhetoric is rife with debate about the interrelationships
among truth (including history and memory vs. forgetting
of the past), justice (variously understood), social peace (or
African notion of social harmony.5 In Tutu’s version of reconciliation (informed by the Christian gospel), confession
by the wrongdoer and forgiveness by the wronged are the
keys to the double lock of intractable conflict hardened by
violent oppression and resistance/revenge, and when this
lock is opened, the fundamental spiritual reality of ubuntu is
released in reconciliation. Thus, in the TRC hearings, Tutu
urged perpetrators to come forward with the full truth of
their crimes, seeking not only amnesty but forgiveness, and
he lauded victims who forgave.
gious spokespersons combined prophetic preaching against
racism with political activism and a commitment to interracial brotherhood in a rhetoric of nonviolent demonstrations.11 A renewed politico-religious rhetoric of reparation
and reconciliation appeared in the late 1990s. For example,
U.S. Rep. Tony Hall both legislatively proposed and personally offered apologies for slavery in national and international venues, motivated in large part by his faith.12 Similarly,
the line between religion and politics is blurred when law
scholar and reparations advocate Roy L. Brooks calls for the
U.S. government to issue a “moral apology” for slavery (as
opposed to a “political apology”) and recasts reparations as
a component of racial atonement and forgiveness.13 It appears, then, that religious sensibilities and themes make a
significant contribution to public debate about how to deal
with the wrongs and harms of the past, and their influence is
likely to continue. This confluence of religion and politics is
fraught with peril, however. How are practitioners and scholars of reconciliation to navigate the tricky waters between
the Scylla of religious presumption to dictate public action
and the Charybdis of secularism denying any role to religion
in societal reconciliation?
For all its noble intentions, however, Tutu’s spiritual
model of reconciliation has drawn criticism for failing to
sufficiently address questions of justice and political realities that hinder meaningful social reconciliation in South
Africa.6 Some observers criticized Tutu for implicitly pressuring victims to forgive the heinous crimes of apartheid
and for naively asserting that truth leads to reconciliation.7
Others would argue that Tutu’s African-Christian vision of
ubuntu and forgiveness painted a halo of spiritual transcendence over a cynical deal in which whites traded political
power to blacks in exchange for continued social stability,
allowing themselves to continue enjoying the benefits of the
economic privilege they had appropriated under apartheid.8
In this essay, I argue that the interplay between theological
tenets and sociopolitical realities in reconciliation discourse
can be helpfully understood, negotiated, and evaluated by examining reconciliation rhetorically, through logology – Kenneth Burke’s lens for exploring how discourses incorporate,
construe, accentuate, and play out key terms in relation to
each other. After all, it is in and through language that social
actors understand and define a situation as calling for reconciliation and propound a vision of what reconciliation would
entail. Doxtader has shown that reconciliation is above all
a self-referential public discourse toward transforming the
terms of violent opposition into terms of peaceable (or at
least nonviolent) dialogue among differences. Self-evident
terms that rhetorically orient social groups toward violent
revolution (e.g., “justice”) or political repression (“peace”)
come under question, becoming subject(s) to rhetorical
dialogue, debate, and redefinition. Key terms pair up and
square off in reconciliation’s discourse; while priority may
be claimed for either one, it is also possible to mediate (and
complicate) the dispute through a third term. Theologians
Despite the shortcomings of reconciliation under the
auspices of Tutu and the TRC, one can hardly fault his persistent, nonviolent opposition to apartheid, undergirded by
his ubuntu theology of reconciliation, as a rhetorical force
that helped make possible the aversion of bloody civil war
through negotiated political agreement. Indeed, such was
Tutu’s ethos as priest to the faithful and prophet to the nation
that Mandela appointed him chairperson of the TRC, along
with two other commissioners who were active ordained
ministers. Tutu notes, “The President must have believed
that our work would be profoundly spiritual.”9 In addition,
Tutu’s peers on the TRC accepted his wearing of the purple
Archbishop’s cassock and incorporation of prayers, hymns,
and ritual candle-lighting in the TRC hearings.10
Thus, the South African experience lends some credence
to the claim that reconciliation’s praxis problematizes walls
of separation between religion and politics – and brings them
into dialogue. U.S. race relations since the 1950s offer more
supporting evidence. In the civil rights era, numerous reli
especially are prone to see such dialectics as paradoxes in
which opposites interdepend. Yet the vagaries of sociopolitical contexts throw such paradoxes off-balance, and secular
or pluralistic societies preclude government propagating a
particular religious tradition as the framework for reconciliation. As such, reconciliation’s rhetorical project invites logological analysis—the study of moral/religious terms(/actions) and their relationships(/inter-actions) in light of their
nature as language.
vision, an orientation that is inherently suasory. Applied to
the subject of this essay, Burke’s perspective would recommend that observers pay as much attention to the kind of
orientation and implicit action that are produced by reconciliation discourse as they do to questions of its accuracy in
describing “reality.” In other words, the ethical quality and
internal coherence of its orientation are at least as important as it external correspondence to the historical situation
– whether that situation be regarded as “natural” material circumstances or as a manifestation of “supernatural” forces.
In this study, I bring logology and major terms of reconciliation discourse into conversation, so that they may
inform and enrich each other. I begin with an explication
of Burke’s original conception of logology, highlighting its
potential contributions and limitations for understanding
reconciliation as a rhetoric that dances between the sacred
and secular. To complement and counteract Burke’s insights
vis-à-vis reconciliation, I also incorporate philosopher Paul
Ricoeur’s conception of humans as ethico-moral selves rooted in shared narrativity, aiming at the good life in community, passing through the sieve of the moral norm and tragic
experience, and reaching a wisdom (phronesis) that judges
and acts for the critical good in each situation. I then offer
a rudimentary (dia)logology of reconciliation informed by
reconciliation discourse and Bakhtinian dialogics. With this
framework, I clarify some of the connections and disconnects between reconciliation as theology and reconciliation
as a public practice, offer a way to make sense of the contradictory priorities in different accounts of reconciliation, and
characterize the social psychology of reconciliation in terms
of discursive framing. I conclude by discussing the value and
limitations of this approach.
In The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke introduces logology as
an epistemological framework for understanding language
as symbolic action and makes his case for modeling it after
the verbal form of theological assertions (while bracketing
the content).17 Burke reasons that theology “almost necessarily becomes an example of words used with thoroughness.
Since words-about-God would be as far-reaching as words
can be, the ‘rhetoric of religion’ furnishes a good instance of
terministic enterprise in general.”18 Thus, Burke respects the
logological power of religious discourse (which adds superlinguistic, i.e. “supernatural,” overtones to language about
the nature of things) while bracketing ontological questions
about God, the miraculous, and the like. As such, logology
provides a conceptual forum where the religious and secular
may meet without necessarily reducing one to the other.
Burke offers six analogies between logology and Christian theology, two of which have particular relevance to developing a logological model of reconciliation: the formal
similarity between the Trinity and the linguistic situation,
and the analogy between theology’s temporal/eternal dialectic and that in verbal statement. Regarding the Trinitarian
analogy, Burke suggests that the relation between a thing
and its name is like that between the Father and Son or God
and the Word (Logos): in each case, the former can be said
to “generate” the latter, while the latter embodies/governs
knowledge of the former. Thus, these “opposites” (FatherSon, thing-name) are properly understood as interdependent
counterparts characterized by a relation of “correspondence” or, in personal terms, “communion” (theologically
identified as a third “person” – the Holy Spirit). Burke also
points out that the Hegelian metaphysics, “so close to theology,” expresses the same logological structure in the triad
Burke’s Rhetoric of Religion and Logology
Kenneth Burke’s primary contribution to understanding
human affairs lies in his contention that humans are motivated in and through language.14 In tension with biological
motives and instincts, language itself constitutes motive and
(inter)action for humans.15 Terminologies do not merely describe physical states of affairs; they constitute rhetorical
situations that call for particular actions.16 The choice and
placement of terms in a specific discursive tapestry create a
of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.19 The very nature of language,
Burke argues, entails such shuttling back and forth between
opposition and complementation, diversity and unity.
ent society and their own identities in new ways and find
agency newly constituted to undergo the inevitable sacrifices
in remaking the social order as a moral community. As Paul
Ricoeur would say, such narrative configurations become resources for refiguring our lives.22
A second analogy Burke identifies between logology and
Christian theology has to do with the dialectic of the temporal
and the eternal. Burke notes that while the expression (and
reception) of a sentence is temporal, emerging syllable by
syllable, the meaning of the sentence is also a logical whole,
a timeless configuration in which all the parts are co-present.
Thus verbal statement, viewed logologically, is analogous to
the theological characterization of Christ both as the eternal
Logos and as the Redeemer progressively revealed and incarnated in time. Hegel repeats the form of this operation in
translating the logic of his dialectic into a theory of history.
Thus, a logological perspective provides “conceptual instruments for shifting back and forth between ‘philosophic’ and
‘narrative’ terminologies of motives, between temporal and
logical kinds of sequence [. . .] thereby cutting down the
distance there seems to be between poetic and philosophic
styles of statement.”20 Burke further explains the utility of logology: “The mythic approach [to thought] slights the logical element, quite as the logical approach slights the mythic
element; the linguistic approach leads readily into both without being confined to either.”21
A logological approach to reconciliation also presents
limitations. Certainly, understanding a complex political/
economic/social-psychological/spiritual process through a
cluster of interrelated terms is a reductive move and must
be recognized as such. Yet this reduction highlights the
place (ethos) of language in these domains and establishes
a provisional “center of gravity” around which a hermeneutic exploration of reconciliation discourse may orbit.23 The
concrete circumstances that set in motion differing reconciliation cases render such hermeneutic circling variously elliptical for each case, without necessarily disintegrating the
proposed configuration of ethical terms/acts at the heart of
such discourses.
Counterstatements to Burkean Logology
Nonetheless, if this ethical core is to hold (even provisionally) within a logological approach to reconciliation, one
must counteract a problematic tendency in Burke’s work:
overemphasizing the symbol as the essence of language, the
negative as its defining characteristic, and hierarchy-building as its compulsion.24 Burke’s work comprises a powerful
humanistic counter-statement to the scientism and behaviorism that dominated the study of human activity in much of
the twentieth century but is less satisfactory as a philosophy
of language or an account of humans’ relations to the world
and each other.25 Fascinated by language as a humanly invented symbolic “instrument” that separates humans from
their “natural condition” and from each other,26 Burke offered little basis or direction for positively promoting harmony in interaction; instead, his approach seems to settle
for comic correctives (negations of tragic pieties that drive
humans to victimage), a kind of ironic “salvation through
knowledge” by which the reflecting individual transcends or
escapes the apparent inevitability of tragic conflict.27
Approaching reconciliation logologically offers certain
advantages. It would lend clarity to analysis of reconciliation
discourse, establishing commonplaces for arguments about
the priority or order of given elements of reconciliation within a specific rhetorical situation. One might examine the different sequential models or manifestations of reconciliation
in light of a common cluster or cycle of terms/acts that are
intrinsically interrelated and implicate one another, regardless of the order in which they emerge in practice in various
contexts. Moreover, religious narratives/rituals, frequently
grounded in concrete historical characters and contexts, may
be understood as mythic/sacramental approaches to working
out the extreme ethical-moral tensions among such terms of
civil society. From a logological perspective, social actors
need not limit themselves to either adopting or rejecting the
specific agents/agencies and plots of redemption commended in religious traditions; rather, by engaging such narratives
and rituals they may come to understand the terms of pres-
Yet language need not be seen solely or primarily through
the lens of its instrumentality and negativity. Indeed, John
Stewart argues for moving beyond the atomizing symbol
model to an understanding of language as “articulate contact;”28 in this light, the bridging/connecting capacity of
language and the possibility of peaceful coherence come to
the fore.29 Mikhail Bakhtin shows that language is intrinsically dialogic, whether communicators seek to communicate
dialogically or not. Contra the structuralism of modern linguistics (a la Ferdinand de Saussure), Bakhtin regards the
living, responsive utterance (whether single-word interjection or lengthy formal address) as the paradigmatic element
of language.30 As such, the structures of language bear the
marks and meanings of the innumerable prior interpersonal
and public conversations, rhetorical genres are dialogized,31
and languages themselves reflect the heteroglossia of intercultural exchange.32 In light not only of Bakhtin’s dialogism,
but also Burke’s concepts of counterstatement and perspective by incongruity (the comic corrective),33 logology might
reasonably be rendered as dia-logology, treating terms not
merely as mechanistically interconnected, but as inter-acting with (and upon) one another in the dialogic dynamism
of discourse.
even friendship. If Order (as prohibition and hierarchy) is
one side of the Covenantal coin, surely a term such as Communion or Relation constitutes the other side. Here the positive commands to love God and one’s neighbor as oneself
are implied. Here agency is opened up and pervaded by what
Ricoeur refers to as solicitude for others, with the suffering that compassion entails.35 Sacrifice is less a matter of
victimage or scapegoating and more a matter of loving selflimitation and self-giving for the benefit of the Other with
whom one is in covenant and through whom one’s identity is
(re)defined.36 It is precisely such notions that the rhetoric of
reconciliation calls us to grapple with, in tandem with concerns for a just order.
Ricoeur and Reconciliation’s Terms
Significantly, recent Christian models of reconciliation
have shifted away from the legalistic, hierarchical redemption model that dominated Western theology for centuries
and toward a rediscovery of the relational emphasis in the
gospel teachings.37 Some theologians insist that both the juridical and the relational aspects of alienation and reconciliation are equally pivotal and must be addressed together.38
Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical treatment of ethics parallels this
theological reintegration of the juridical and relational, and it
provides a philosophical basis for correcting the imbalance
in Burkean logology vis-à-vis reconciliation. In Oneself as
Another, Ricoeur sums up the ethical intention as “aiming
at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.”39
The “good life” has do with making meaningful connections
– between oneself and others, community, and tradition, and
among the multiple roles and aims by which one’s self is
already constituted – and developing a narrative unity of a
life fulfilled in meaningful projects in the world.40 Ricoeur
does not view language primarily as an instrument of human
agency that separates us from our “natural” condition and
imposes order(s), but as the medium in which we creatively
(re)construct our lives as stories “with and for others.”
Burke’s fascination with the negative and hierarchical
impulse in language led him to focus on these elements in
Christian religious texts to the detriment of other, equally
important elements. For instance, Burke’s logological
analysis of the Judeo-Christian scriptures yields a cluster
(or “cycle”) of terms implicit in the idea of Order (both as
prohibitive command and as hierarchy) despite his acknowledgement of the prevalence of covenant language in biblical
texts. Burke’s rationale for basing his cluster of inter-related
terms on Order rather than Covenant is that the latter is “not
wholly convenient for our purposes. Having no opposite in
standard usage, it seems as purely ‘positive’ as words like
‘stone,’ ‘tree,’ or ‘table’ . . . . The term ‘Order,’ on the other
hand, clearly reveals its dialectical or polar nature, on its
face. ‘Order’ implies ‘disorder,’ and vice versa.”34 Burke’s
aforementioned “purposes” have to do with showing that
“guilt and vicarious sacrifice are intrinsic to the idea of Covenant.” Yet Burke’s resultant cluster of terms fails to include
less pejorative terms that are equally intrinsic to the idea of
Covenant and are highlighted especially in the prophets and
the Christian testament: love, care, community, faithfulness,
Nonetheless, the dangerous potential for instrumentalizing others within one’s narrative project and thereby doing
them violence is not lost on Ricoeur. The phrase “in just institutions” above supplies what he sees as an essential, if sec
ondary, corrective to this proclivity in pursuing a narrative
unity of life, complicated and conflicted by the competing
interests and narratives of others. Thus, the ethico-moral life
cannot be reduced to either the good or the right alone. For
Ricoeur, the good and the right entail the difference between
“esteem” for oneself and “respect” for selves.41 Whereas self
esteem (for Ricoeur) has to do with one’s integrity in developing a narrative unity of life, respect for each self is about
establishing reciprocity between selves wherever it is lacking, as expressed in the Golden Rule: do unto others as you
would have them do unto you. It falls to institutions to see
to it that this rule of reciprocity is not egregiously violated
and to mediate disputes among parties impartially, regarding
each equally as a subject of justice (held to the same standard) and interposing an equal distance between each party
in the distribution of goods and determination of desert.42
the just in this situation.46 Thus, our detour through Ricoeur
returns us to the need for reconciliation and Doxtader’s thesis that reconciliation is, above all, a rhetorical project, situated in and by concrete historical conditions.
Bringing Burke and Ricoeur into conversation around
reconciliation offers depth of insight into its rhetorical-ethical workings. Appropriating Burke directs attention to the
terms of reconciliation as actions in its rhetorical discourse
and how the placement of these terms in relation to one another within a particular discourse orients rhetors and audiences to approach reconciliation in particular ways. Burke
makes us aware that comedy and tragedy in human discourse
are not just literary devices; they serve as rhetorical frames
in which certain responses to social conflict make sense (and
thereby gain adherents), and others do not.47 As Burke interprets them, the tragic frame places human action under the
rule of unyielding laws or principles, such that every violation inexorably leads to due punishment, whereas the comic
frame casts wrongs as forgivable mistakes, misrecognitions
that temporarily disrupt social harmony and the realization
of the good. The tragic frame measures individuals by the
blind, cold calculus of justice under the law (as duty, desert, or strict fairness – e.g., an eye for an eye); the comic
frame presents parties who are blind to kinships that exist at
a deeper level and eventually removes the scales from their
eyes so they may enjoy the warmth of companionship and
community.48 The shortcoming in Burke’s development of
the tragic and comic frames is a tendency toward linguistic determinism (where the workings of the tragic are concerned) in tension with a compensatory idealism (regarding
the capability of apparently transcendent subjects to adopt
the comic frame at will). Appropriating Ricoeur highlights
the ontological and axiological significance of narratives as
inherent in humans’ life-world. His account of human being in language more coherently affirms the impulse toward
wholeness in dialogue with others. It also more clearly recognizes that the comic and tragic are societal experiences as
much as orientations; humans are simultaneously subjects
engaging in (re)interpretation and subject to the social realities engendered by prior, given interpretations. As selves
that maintain identity (in the sense of constancy) through
narrative (entailing other selves), they are also accountable
to others, who “count on” them to be true to their word (an
John Wall reads respect or reciprocity in Ricoeur as “a
predominantly negative concept, the negative side, if you
will, of the positive aim of the narrative unity of a life. It
demands that one not instrumentalize others, that one acknowledge in others a certain ‘genuine otherness’ to which
one must not do violence.”43 Here Burke’s recognition of
the inescapable, moral(izing) negativity of human agency
in language is confirmed, yet with a crucial difference: for
Ricoeur, the positive pursuit of the good life “with and for
others” is clearly the prior impulse, and the negative is its
dialectical shadow side, testing whether the institutional order or hierarchy humans inevitably build in the pursuit of
their narrative unity and social good is a just order, upholding the rights of each Other. Tragically, in a world of limited
resources and limited vision, pursuing the good often produces deprivation and suffering for those outside the circle
of one’s envisioned community, an unintended consequence
of attempting to actualize some sort of “divine comedy” in
human affairs. Applying the impartial, and therefore relatively impersonal, calculus of justice measured out behind
John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” proves necessary to realize
the truly good life44 – yet not sufficient, since the defense
of individuals’ rights does not equal the knitting together
of community or of meaningful wholeness.45 Caught in this
tragic-comic dilemma, human actors are called upon to develop and exercise critical phronesis – wise judgment arising
out of public discourse and debate concerning the good and
A Rudimentary (Dia)logology
of Reconciliation
act simultaneously binding a person to others and the self).49
This thoroughly ethical understanding of human being in
language can undergird analysis of reconciliation as a work
of moral redemption and communal restoration.
In a previous study,54 I identified four major terms that
often appear (explicitly or implicitly) as tensional pairings
or oppositions in reconciliation discourse and suggested that
the following “dialectics” lie at the heart of debate about the
terms under which reconciliation may or should occur:55
Understanding reconciliation through hermeneutic dialogue between Burke and Ricoeur has social psychological
implications. Under the best of civil conditions (what citizens in a relatively prosperous, just, and peaceful democratic
society might refer to as “normal” life), humans may adopt
a range of rhetorical frames for dealing with life’s tensions,
imperfections, and transgressions without undue difficulty.
In other words, they may experience relative expansiveness
or flexibility of agency, while remaining subject to the strong
influence of prior interpretation. However, under conditions
of gross injustice and/or brutal violence (whether present or
remembered), their perceptions may become hardened by
circumstance. Eric Yamamoto notes that “individual feelings
of loss and anger are magnified” by the process of collective
mourning, in which “social groups, institutions, and nations
filter and twist, recall and forget ‘information’ in reframing
shameful past acts (thereby lessening responsibility) as well
as in enhancing victim status (thereby increasing power).”50
These group memories then become mythologized as they
are passed on through subsequent generations; tragic and
comic perspectives may no longer be recognized as ways
of framing events.51 As a logological-ethical practice, reconciliation calls humans back to the dance of agency between
framing society as it ought to be (a harmonious community in which all enjoy the good) and suffering what it is
– broken by violence and bent by injustice.52 Through narrative and ritual, reconciliation vicariously walks humans
through a broken world on a quest to reassert wholeness and
moral order in the midst of the brokenness and the loss of
shared moral ground.53 Through dialogue and debate, it enables them to discover and reinvent the ways in which they
share in brokenness and must therefore share in the work
of restoration. What, then, are the terms of reconciliation’s
(dia)logological work?
• peace (or “reconciliation” as peacemaking) vs. truth
(including memory);
• justice vs. truth;
• grace (often in the form of forgiveness or amnesty)
vs. truth;
• justice vs. peace;
• justice (often as repentance/restitution) vs. grace (as
forgiveness or amnesty);
• peace (or “reconciliation”) vs. grace (forgiveness).
On closer examination, however, these are not strict dialectics that could be resolved in some transcendent Hegelian
synthesis. Reconciliation is more complex than that. Indeed,
Doxtader suggests, it is “the inauguration of a dialectic with
more than two sides.”56 Following Bakhtin, I would go farther and characterize reconciliation as a polyphonic dialogue
among (at least) four logological voices, each speaking
for(th) a term of human existence in society: Truth, Grace,
Justice, and Peace (the four terms interlocked in the six oppositional pairings identified above). Burke implicitly opens
the door for developing logological analysis in this direction
with his notion of irony as a master trope.57 He also does
so when he characterizes the relation among the Trinitarian
terms not only as “correspondence” (i.e., God-Word-Breath)
but also “communion” (Father-Son-Love); however, he obscures the latter by making “Order” the paradigmatic term of
both logology and the rhetoric of redemption.
A story told by peace scholar John Paul Lederach projects an apt image of reconciliation as a polyphonic conversation among ethical/religious terms. As a Mennonite peace
worker in Nicaragua, Lederach reportedly read a verse from
the Hebrew psalms to local conciliators with whom he was
working: “Truth and mercy have met together; peace and
justice have kissed.”58 Lederach asked them to discuss each
of these concepts as if it were a person, “describing the images it brought to mind, and what each would have to say
about conflict.”59 After they had discussed each, Lederach relates, “When I asked the participants what we should call the
place where Truth and Mercy, Justice and Peace meet, one
of them immediately said, “That place is reconciliation.”60
In addition to this dialogic metaphor, Lederach asserts a dialectic conception of reconciliation as “built on paradox, that
which links seemingly contradictory but in fact interdependent ideas and forces, “such that “it is necessary to identify
the opposing energies that form the poles of the paradox,
provide space for each, and embrace them as interdependent
and necessary for the health of the group.”61
tion of reconciliation. However, there is significance in the
pairing of terms opposite each other. Justice and peace are
most typically seen to be at odds when systemic oppression
provokes reprisals that seek to overthrow the system, shattering relative peace to achieve justice. Likewise, the grace of
forgiveness (and amnesty) is often (dis)regarded as amnesia
– glossing over the truth about deeds so evil that they should
never be forgotten or minimized. The terms located between
these pairs (on either side) can be understood as voices that,
to some extent, mediate and moderate such opposition. This
figuration reflects a relatively secular, pragmatic understanding of reconciliation as the negotiations of transitional politics. It does not necessarily assume these terms are intrinsically bound together at some deeper level. Reconciliation in
the thinnest sense – “peaceful, nonlethal coexistence” – may
require little input from, or attention to, one or more of these
terms.62 Truth may be minimized in the interest of forgiveness, or the grace of forgiveness may not enter into the process of uncovering truth, or justice may be glossed over so
as to avoid threats to a fragile peace. Nonetheless, I would
argue, if reconciliation is to provide a substantial, stable discursive foundation for ongoing democratic reciprocity,63 all
four voices must enter into the dialogue fully. This ontological-axiological claim leads us in the direction of reconciliation’s intersection with theology.
To unpack the complexity of reconciliation, then, I offer
two heuristic figures, one highlighting contingent dialogic
encounter among differing terministic voices, the other accenting paradoxical unities among terms that become dialectically opposed to one another in the wake of violence and
oppression. The first figure is that of a roundtable at which
Grace, Justice, Truth, and Peace come together in dialogue.
Here, reconciliation is a polyphonic discourse joining these
distinct voices, as divided parties talk through and transform
current views of the conflictual situation to construct and enact a more shared visin of ethical relations:
In a thicker (and generally more theological) conception,
reconciliation is the dialogic outworking of a paradoxical
unity in and among multiple dialectics. If merely reductive
to oneness, it would no longer be dialogic, but a monologic
presumption and imposition of (someone’s) agency. However, the Christian theology of the Trinity is helpful here,
in that it refuses to dissolve divine unity into a plurality of
persons or to resolve their plurality into unity; it insists, rather, on holding these in perpetual tension as the very genesis
and heart of the universe. Applied to the terms of reconciliation, such an understanding undergirds attempts to redress
collective offenses from decades or even centuries past in
a way that heals the fault lines created by violence and oppression. Along such fault lines, groups remain divided into
haves and have-nots, resentful and defensive, generations after the original violation, and the rumblings of social tension
repeatedly recur. It may be that a certain temporal distance,
allowing for a measure of healing and deeper moral reflec-
Since the circle represents a table seen from above, none
of the terministic voices has a privileged place in this concep
tion, is one of the conditions of reconciliation at this level. In
any case, when reconciliation initiatives are proposed long
after the fact (as in post-civil rights America), they tend to
be premised on faith in an ontological oneness or harmony
amid the divisions, a moral order of unity-in-diversity that
can and must be restored – rather than a clear political exigence.64 While critics may point out that, historically, “reconciliation” is a misnomer since the groups in question never
enjoyed a state of unity or harmony prior to the violence that
vexed their earliest encounters, reconciliation advocates operating out of a religious worldview tend to respond with the
belief that such unity or harmony is primal, intrinsic to the
teleology of humans as ethical beings, and therefore prior to
the happenstances of history.65
as Tutu). I do not presume to offer an exhaustive explanation
of reconciliation, but rather a schema to help analysts make
sense of the messy complexity of reconciliation discourse
in public affairs. Such sense-making is best understood as a
moment within the ongoing hermeneutic dialogue between
reconciliation as generic theory/model and reconciliation as
discursive practice.67
The second (dia)logological figuration of reconciliation I
am proposing comports with such understandings. Heuristically, it treats each of the four terms as discursive nodes or
“atoms” within what might be seen as reconciliation’s polyhedral “molecular structure.” Remove one of them, and what
remains is not reconciliation but some altogether different
“element” of social reformation. As each term is in complementary tension with each other term, reconciliation’s logology may be visually represented in a pyramidal configuration
with the four terms as its points, and its six edges representing the dialectics one encounters among these terms in the
reconciliation literature. While the terms can be treated as
focal points of discursive or philosophical attention, each
term also provides a potential point of view, a psychological
or rhetorical angle on the other terms and on reconciliation
itself. Conceptual cognates on these terms, which reflect and
(re)produce a slight shift in orientation, constitute variant
approaches to reconciliation as a whole. Furthermore, depending on the situation and specificity of focus, numerous
“inflections” or “voicings” of these root concepts appear in
reconciliation discourse.66 This conceptualization of reconciliation comports with Burke’s logological analysis of the
Trinity: the terms are both intrinsically (dialectically) related
and engaged in ever-emerging conversation or communion
(relating). In the exploration that follows, I primarily play out
the possibilities suggested by this “thicker,” more theological
figure of reconciliation as it may inform pragmatic political
reconciliation through background cultural beliefs and sensibilities as well as prominent religious spokespersons (such
The logology of reconciliation proposed in Figure 1 consists elementally in the interplay among the families/clusters of terms represented by “truth,” “grace,” “justice,” and
“peace” (or harmony). At the ontological level, this logology stems from the interdependence of knowledge, agency,
order, and relation. Each of the latter is inherent and interrelated in human existence. In Ricoeurian terms, the language-world(s) into which we are born and socialized offer
a “prefigured” knowledge of the (social) reality and meaning
of our lives.68 Of course, since the namings and narratives
that comprise our knowledge are themselves socio-cognitive
constructions, knowledge itself is not devoid of agency, but
in any given rhetorical situation, some knowledge is more
or less predetermined (culturally given). Burke asserts it is
our “symbolicity” that enables (indeed, compels) us to act,
to exercise creative agency in relation to the (knowledge of
the) situation given to us. Ricoeur highlights the human capacity for “productive invention,” using metaphor and plot
(narrative) to imaginatively order or “grasp together” the
phenomena of prefigured cultural consciousness in ways
that sometimes bridge disparate categories, while remaining accountable to others within one’s lived story.69 In light
of such creative configurations, humans in turn are able to
refigure their lives into intelligible wholes, thereby exercising a measure of agency as the character-narrators, though
not the authors, of their own lives.70 Knowledge and agency
are, therefore, both in tension and interdependent. Similarly,
humans require both a sense of relation or belonging and a
sense of order or hierarchy. Indeed, although the misuse of
power may force these two elements into mutual opposition
(where the imposition of order damages relationships, and,
conversely, the pursuit of meaningful human relationship requires violating the rules of the existing order), it is impossible to have one without the other. Hierarchy intrinsically
depends on persons or elements being related in a particular
way, and relation would cease to be meaningful if the individuals in society lost all sense of stable, ordered distinctness, all capacity to play differential roles or differentiate
diverse actions on some scale of value. What, then, of the
first set of terms I proposed as constitutive of reconciliation
discourse: truth, grace, justice, and peace?
Grace. The (dia)logology I propose here draws support
from both secular and sacred angles on human discourse and
reconciliation. This is most significantly true of Grace, which
I intentionally locate at the top of the pyramid. Secularly
speaking, Burke treats of grace as that which the Word brings
to nature.72 It is especially evident in concentrated creative
language (e.g., literature), which infuses readers/listeners
with an enlightening “grace of statement” (i.e., comic grace)
or a purging “grace of catharsis” (i.e., tragic grace) for negotiating the tensions of life.73 For logology, language as action is the pivotal point (and pinnacle) of human endeavors.
Reconciliation seems to epitomize language as inter-action;
indeed, Doxtader shows it to be a form of metadiscourse
– “talks about talks” or “a rhetoric of rhetorical history-making.”74 When the discourse of justice and the discourse of
peace are no longer on speaking terms within a society, reconciliation discourse bespeaks both, seeking to envision and
speak forth a society in which the terms of these discourses
once again (are seen to) collaborate rather than compete.
This is a consummate expression of (dia)logological grace.
While agency, knowledge, order, and relation constitute
the project of (social) existence, reconciliation’s project
foregrounds the call to reverse and repair ethical disintegration within and among these terms of human society. Grace,
truth, justice, and peace connote ethically valenced agency,
knowledge, order, and relation.71 For a “thick” logology or
“theo-logology” of reconciliation, it is not enough that the
latter ontologically implicate one another. Rather, it is axiologically incumbent upon human beings to recognize the
interconnection, intentionally bringing these terms to bear
upon one another and reconstructing them in tropological
conversation (i.e., Bakhtinian polyphony or Burkean irony)
wherein none trumps (reduces) the others. In other words,
reconciliation discourse summons a kind of grace in human
agency to restore both right order (justice) and good relations (peace or harmony) in light of truth about the unreconciled situation. Dialectically speaking, each of these terms
of ethical life together paradoxically entails the other three.
Dialogically speaking, reconciliation rhetoric sets grace,
truth, justice, and peace into play with one another, contesting their hardening as isolated (id)entities while maintaining their distinctness. Below, I consider each of these terms,
both in itself and in relation to the others that inform it.
In theological understandings of reconciliation, the presence (and perhaps primacy) of grace is more than happenstance, a mere accident of nature in humans are endowed
with language. For Judeo-Christian theology, which informs
much reconciliation discourse, grace has a divine origin and
exemplifies divinity. Divine agency creates the world and
gives speech to humans made in God’s image; by divine initiative, humans are called into covenants of faithful communion and enduring peace with God; divine holiness mandates
laws of justice and righteousness for God’s chosen people
and judges each infraction; and divine revelation exposes
hypocrisy, unfaithfulness, and injustice while bringing forth
prophetic truth. But above all, at the consummation of an age,
divine grace breaks forth in the self-giving, sacrificial love
of Christ, washing over and transforming all – nature, human being, covenants, laws, and prior revelation. This grace
self-sacrificially satisfies the demands of the Law while forgiving the lawbreakers. Significantly, God’s grace in Christ
does not eliminate law and justice, covenant community, or
revelation in a free-for-all of untrammeled agency; rather,
it accentuates and completes them (e.g., Christ extrapolates
the intent of the Torah to an impossible level, then claims
that he has come not to abolish it, but to fulfill it, and he
10
calls his disciples to a level of community characterized by
the self-sacrificial love and divine union he demonstrates).
In the Christian testament, humans are redeemed and made
whole, not by their works of righteousness, but by divine
grace, through a gift of faith in Christ, which then enables
them to act with grace and reconciliation toward others. Indeed, for Christian theology, even human repentance hinges
upon divine initiative and enabling grace; divine forgiveness
both precedes and follows repentance. Both self-flagellation
(mortification) and making excuses miss the mark; both fail
to recognize and receive divine grace.
(facts, experiences, and interpretations of the past), the relationship, and in/justice. For a (dia)logology of reconciliation, grace is not king, but it does appear to be “first among
equals.”
Peace. Although the literature on reconciliation typically
refers to questions of “peace,” the term harmony may be
preferable, since it suggests positive peace (as opposed to
negative peace, the mere absence of conflict) and reflects the
communal emphasis of African and Afrocentric approaches.76 Harmony entails a rich unity among diverse elements—
the middle course between mere identity (or uniformity) on
the one hand, and utter opposition (the ironic unity of enemies “joined” in battle) on the other. Using harmony as a key
term indicates that coherent reconciliation invokes underlying unity while valuing difference and aspiring to dynamic
peace. Neither the dissonance of disorder nor the rigidity of
enforced order, harmony characterizes Ricoeur’s description
of social peace: “the tranquility of order.”77 Because peace
is the term typically used, I alternate between both terms as
conceptual cognates within reconciliation.
Logology does not commit one to faith in this theology of divine grace; it does, however, suggest that “grace”
is powerfully real for humans and may be the consummate
ethical expression of our (limited and contingent) agency in
language. In everyday social interaction over offenses petty
or egregious, the word “grace” implies that there has been
some violation of a rule, but the agent chooses not to punish the infraction strictly because of empathy or compassion
for the violator as a human being, a vulnerable fellow-agent
constituted by the vagaries of nature and social discourse.
There may be a warning against future infraction (strengthened by the fact that the one who has received grace is now
indebted to the forgiver), but “mercy triumphs over judgment” (that is, strict justice) when grace is shown. Informed
by critical phronesis, the rhetorical grace of reconciliation
negotiates the tensions between social peace and justice
in order to realize, as much as possible, the good between
and beyond them. Such ethical agency resides not in a transcendent Cartesian cogito, nor in Hegelian self-thinking
Thought, nor in language as an instrumental symbol-system,
but rather, as Ricoeur understands it, in the hermeneutic dialogue among selves and cultural narratives unfolding toward
the good to be realized within just institutions. Reconciliation finds agency in relation, finds its way through cultural
narratives, finds its voice in the middle where “performance
and production touch.”75 Between the guilt of violations and
the glory of imagined configurations of individual-collective
life, reconciliation calls for(th) grace. For both repentance
and forgiveness, grace stands at the top of the reconciliation
pyramid, signifying a triumph of negotiated agency suffering the tensions among, and restoring coherence to, “truth”
Justice may be understood in many ways: legal, distributive, retributive, restorative, etc. Restorative justice, I would
argue, amounts to reconciliation (as seen from the angle of
justice); it is justice informed and transformed by ontological recognition of shared humanity and the teleological value
of the shared good in community that justice in itself cannot
produce.78 At the purely institutional/procedural level, however, justice owes allegiance to deontology – duty, injunction, order, desert, law – as Ricoeur recognizes.79 The execution of justice requires the work of institutions processing
humans’ claims on esteem, passing our vaunted plans and
projects through the sieve of moral norms. Strictly speaking, then, justice is blind to kinship, care, compassion, or
communal connection, as figured in John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Of course, in human practice, the calls of kinship,
care, and community temper strict justice and, in ways that
range from magnanimous to morally ambivalent to ethically
repugnant, tinker (or tamper) with the machinery of law. For
Ricoeur, the universal(ized) moral norm is a necessary negative test of humans’ storied claims on the good(s), yet it is
not sufficient or even primary to realizing justice as a moment in the ethical aim/intention toward the good. Indeed,
11
strict justice necessarily produces tragedy by exacerbating
conflict among competing goods; yet, the suffering engendered in tragedy is essential to attaining the critical phronesis (wisdom) that attempts to discern the best path toward the
good and just in a conflict(ed) situation.80
grace, in an effort to weave together the broken or scattered
threads of disparate individuals’ and collectives’ wished-for
“good life, with and for others, in just institutions.”
Grace, peace, justice, truth: each of these (constellations of) terms can provide a point of view (or frame) as
well as a particular focal point of attention in reconciliation.
Considering them as frames, I find support in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism for treating these four terms as
primary constituents of reconciliation. Frye’s literary theory
identifies four fundamental mythic forms or orientations
in literature: comic, tragic, ironic, and romantic.84 Comedy
and tragedy in Frye’s work loosely correspond with Burke’s
comic and tragic frames. If the tragic corresponds with a
justice orientation and the comic with a peace/harmony orientation, the ironic and the romantic correspond with orientations dominated by truth and grace, respectively. Frye
distinguishes the ironic from the comic as a kind of cynical
realism. In other words, irony exposes the baser motives and
fundamental realities/truths underlying human pretensions
to goodness and justice. Romance, on the other hand, is the
unfolding revelation of triumphant, heroic agency through
adventures and trials. Frye suggests that comedy–tragedy
and irony–romance are direct opposites (whereas other pairings among these forms are more complementary than contradictory). Similarly, among the dialectics posed in the reconciliation literature, the strongest oppositions are between
justice and peace(making) and between truth (as disclosing/remembering wrongs, facing material realities, etc.) and
what I am calling grace (in apologizing, forgiving, focusing
on symbolic discourse and ritual, etc.).
Truth. What then of truth in reconciliation? To be sure, the
term invokes an ethical testing of knowledge, which implies
that knowledge is constructed, soundly or otherwise. Indeed,
Ricoeur’s epistemology of narrative knowing in community
provides a warp upon which to weave understanding of truth
in the rhetorical-ethical textuality of reconciliation, in that
narrative mediates description of action and prescription of
ethical conduct.81 Of course, we are here concerned with
historical truth in reconciling a society wounded by human
rights abuses committed under cover of darkness, the anonymity of uniforms, and the secrecy of institutional machinations. Certainly, truthful history presents facts – physical
evidence, eyewitness accounts of events, documents – which
are recalcitrant to the vanishing- or transforming-acts of
rhetorical legerdemain; yet, for reconciliation, the truth of
even these traces lies in their interpretation and presentation
within a larger tapestry of shared stories woven with a view
to establishing justice and peace for the common good. In
Time and Narrative 3, Ricoeur contends that historiography
intended as a “neutral” descriptive exercise cannot escape
the evaluative quality intrinsic to narrativity.82 Much less can
reconciliation’s attempts at a truthful accounting of events
do so.
Truth tests factual claims and the stories that facts are
used to tell; and given the intertextuality of human discourse,
there are multiple strands and layers of storytelling to test
for truthfulness, particularly in contexts where various facts
and stories have been suppressed or distorted amid conflict
and oppression.83 How true are stories of victimization to
the forensic evidence? How true are they to the experiences
of individuals, both perpetrators and victims? How true are
they to the larger sociological realities that the victimization
reflects and (re)produces? How truly repentant are the perpetrators, both individually and collectively? How truly has
repair of human damage been attempted or achieved? These
questions draws the truth-seeker inexorably into the web of
issues raised by reconciliation, between justice, peace, and
Out of the Truth-Grace-Peace-Justice cluster, various states and actions of reconciliation can be theoretically
derived. Below, I suggest how the four terms may be expressed and transformed as reconciliation progresses, considering both intra-reconciliation (internal restoration of coherence to an individual’s or group’s ethical agency in the
situation) and inter-reconciliation (the restoration of moral
coherence between parties).85 These construals of relatively
unreconciled or reconciled states may be regarded both as
logological configurations and as psychological (or psychologological) orientations that tend to frame social actors’ responses to the situation.
12
Logological Process(ing) of Reconciliation
did was unjust, thereby draining away the few drops of grace
the victims have to give to the relationship, and thus stirring
up enmity (as in some of South Africa’s TRC hearings). The
roundtable metaphor of reconciliation allows for the reality
that Justice or Truth may not be invited to the table of rapprochement, or that the ruling powers may call in weak surrogates that do not give full voice to the term they purportedly represent. Such reconciliation may successfully stave
off violence but fail to reconcile society at a deeper level.
A thick logology indicates that the four terms and their discourses cohere within reconciliation, so an uncorrected fault
or lack in regard to any one of them will negatively impact
the others. If the lack or fault is strongly felt—as in gross
human rights violations and their aftereffects—it may constitute an exigence for reconciliation. However, because of
the complex tensions inherent in reconciliation, each party
to such a situation may identify an exigence only for seeking
justice or only for making peace (cheap reconciliation), etc.,
depending on which symptoms of social dis-ease are more
salient to that party.
First, there must be a rhetorical situation (construed as)
requiring reconciliation. “Reconciliation is not for all times
or all conflicts,” Doxtader contends; rather, its occasion is a
“state of emergency” in which laws of identity and retribution bind antagonists to the wheel of potentially endless hostility.86 This may be true of political/secular reconciliation;
however, from the religious side of logology’s secular-sacred
interface one might argue that reconciliation is an ongoing
“ministry” to which the faithful are called, ever working at
a spiritual level against the entropy of ethical (dis)integrity
within human societies (until the inauguration of a new,
messianic order at the end of time).87 From this perspective,
human society may be in a long-term state of emergency that
calls for such a ministry. Either way, one can examine this
situation from the intra- or inter- perspective.
The exigencies requiring reconciliation will be more
clearly delineated if we translate its logology into terms of
each party’s psychological orientation toward the social situation. As I have explained elsewhere,89 violence/violation
damages or distorts both the victim’s and the victimizer’s
sense of agency in some way; the grace that would be present in a healthy relationship is displaced or overburdened
by resentment (mixed with fear, anger, shame, hatred, etc.)
on the victim’s part and defensiveness (with fear, denial, arrogance, hatred, etc.) on the victimizer’s part. In the next
figure, the shape of both pyramids is distorted (toward one or
the other side of the harmony-justice dialectic) to suggest the
converse perceptual imbalances fostered by victimization.
The gray area circumscribed from the top of each pyramid
indicates the frame in which that party would most readily
perceive the social condition between them:
As Figure 2 suggests, it is possible to have a tense
peace—an appearance of harmony—but still need reconciliation regarding wrongs that have been overlooked out of fear
more than grace. For example, in U.S. race relations, many
white citizens’ fears of black rage, “reverse discrimination,”
and the specter of reparations lead them to downplay racial
difference in a rhetoric of color-blindness that denies, mutes,
or delegitimizes race conflict.88 Nonetheless, the conflict
persists, often in the form of tensions beneath the surface.
Regarding truth, it may be well-known yet denied (as in Holocaust denials), or perpetrators may fully disclose the truth
of their crimes yet never show any awareness that what they
13
a considerable measure of intra-reconciliation.90 A theological orientation, in contrast with philosophical materialism,
gives causal priority to such internal or spiritual transformation of agency (through sacred story, ritual, etc.) in reconciliation. A (dia)logological approach follows suit to the extent
of locating motive power in language as communicative
(inter)action. I turn now to the process of intra-reconciliation through language.
Taking my lead from Robert Schreiter’s model of individual reconciliation, I suggest that there must be some Other
with whom a victim or victimizer engages in (hermeneutic)
dialogue in order for intra-reconciliation to occur. This “agent
of reconciliation” may be a wise and caring individual or
community or, I suggest, it may be a non-physical agent that
is present(ed) to the unreconciled party through a reconciliation narrative/drama (a historical or fictional work, a myth, a
religious story, a ritual, prayer, etc.). This agent or mediator
of reconciliation imparts the “grace of catharsis” and/or the
“grace of statement” to the unreconciled party through some
form of interaction and identification, enabling the victim(s)
or victimizer(s) to gain greater control of their perceptions
of the situation, to recompose the story in such a way that a
freer, healthier response becomes possible.91
Here, the victimizing individual or group is obsessed with
keeping control of the relationship, preventing violent or legal reprisal so as to continue enjoying the gains derived from
the violation and the unequal power relationship. At the same
time, the real claims of justice are held at a distance through
denial; because the oppressor is invested in the status quo of
the unequal relationship, this party tends to see the situation
through a comic frame, emphasizing the interdependence of
the parties rather than the injustice of the arrangement. As a
result, any effort by the oppressed party to redress injustice
is perceived as a disruption to the harmony of the relationship and hence a dangerous violation or injustice in its own
right. For example, in U.S. race relations, many whites decry
affirmative action as “reverse discrimination.” For the victims, on the other hand, unsatisfied justice is the salient matter. Resentment for the violation and the subsequent lack of
redress binds their sense of agency to a pursuit of justice that
may not be fully realizable under the circumstances. They
are sensitive to any further slights or wounds and are pressed
to see the relationship through a tragic frame in which vengeance or punishment appears sweet. If justice is frustrated
long enough, they may turn to violence or lose all sense of
the humanity of the Other. Such frustration evidently came
to a head in the L. A. riots following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beatings.
As Schreiter points out, the agent of reconciliation may
simply ask questions, listen, provide a sense of security and
care, and facilitate the unreconciled party’s own process of
gaining agency through repeated retelling and reshaping of
the story. However, Schreiter’s own model of reconciliation derives from a “master narrative” specific to Christians
(Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and reconnection with his
scattered disciples). The unreconciled party’s recovery narrative may well take shape through identification with such
a master narrative—the “agency” of reconciliation—and its
human hero and/or divine agent, perhaps (but not necessarily) aided by participation in prayer, dialogue with a peer,
a sacrament of confession, role playing, etc. The intra-reconciliation may even take place (to some degree) through
interaction with one’s counterpart in the conflict who is now
repentant or has a forgiving disposition, etc. There may also
be some term or image (e.g., for Christians, the cross, or the
bread and wine of the Mass/Eucharist) that encapsulates the
grace of the story/interaction/ritual. The point is that con-
In this state, reconciliation between victim and victimizer is all but impossible. Some changes must take place
internally (perhaps facilitated by external political changes,
as in South Africa’s democratic transition, America’s civil
rights legislation, or proposals to memorialize or apologize
for slavery) before either will be freed to act for coherent
reconciliation. If the parties are groups, at least one member
from each side, and preferably a “cadre,” must experience
14
nection, real or imagined, with an agent of grace (especially
a grace triumphant over suffering and bitterness) can enable
the unreconciled person(s) to become reconciled within,
recomposing the distorted or fragmented elements of their
humanity in accordance with the logology of reconciliation
worked out in the mediating agent’s story and/or attitudes
and actions toward the unreconciled party.
In Figure 5, the pyramids are more or less symmetrical,
suggesting that intra-reconciliation brings the party’s own
perceptions and attitudes regarding truth, justice, and peace
in the relationship closer to a healthy balance that would sustain life in civil society. By humbly coming clean with the
agent of reconciliation, the victimizer begins to appropriate
the grace needed to recompose the (perceived) situation with
a penitent attitude toward the victim, taking responsibility
for the past and seeking both redemption and repair in the
relationship. Conversely, as the victimized party experiences
connection with an agent of reconciliation and expresses the
pain and loss of violation, grace can begin flowing into that
party’s attitude, reconstructing the situation through (and
for) forgiveness. When at least some representatives/leaders
of each party have experienced intra-reconciliation, the possibility of inter-reconciliation becomes salient.
Figure 4 suggests the transformation that can take place
through such identifications, interactions, and/or narrations
within the perpetrator and the victim of a past wrong. The
two separate intra-reconciliation processes are placed parallel to each other, but this placement is a heuristic idealization. Obviously, one party may work through a process of
intra-reconciliation while the other remains in denial or vice
versa. The pyramids representing their attitudes and actions
are also idealized; many other variations are possible. I have
used the general term relationship to encompass the range of
possibilities from violent or verbal conflict to forced peace
or quiet alienation in an unreconciled relationship. As for the
distinction of victimizer vs. victim, both labels may fit one
or more parties. For example, in South Africa, the African
National Congress (ANC) and other resistance organizations were guilty of terrorist actions against innocent whites,
sometimes including whites who happened to support their
cause.92 Thus, while blacks as a whole were clearly the victims of white oppression under apartheid, some of them
were also victimizers, and some whites were victims, in the
struggle for liberation from that oppression.
Figure 6 (below) is an idealized representation of the two
parties being reconciled. It shows that inter-reconciliation
entails expressions of repentance and forgiveness as logological counterparts, each addressing justice and relationship
together. Both are expressions of the “grace” of reconciliation. To truly forgive, one must realize a measure of grace
that transcends the violation and, in turn, pass on grace to
the offender (as a relatively free act, not under compulsion).
Likewise, repentance responds to and anticipates grace.
Some biblical statements indicate that repentance itself is a
result of divine grace being shown; in turn, the penitent’s
humility moves the divine being to show especial grace.93
In this figure, I am using “repentance” in its broadest outward sense, including such actions as an apology and offer
of reparations. Likewise, “forgiveness” here includes accept15
ing an apology and reparations in lieu of strict justice or vengeance. The depth of meaning these actions carry depends
on the extent to which they follow or accompany a process
of facing the truth of the relationship: sharing stories dialogically, testing them dialectically, and working toward a
fusion of horizons, in which it is possible to weave together
a shared story rhetorically. Repentance and forgiveness add
to this story a new chapter that redeems the identity of the
victimizer from blame and the victim from the indignity of
unredressed grievances, while restoring the relationship to
a state of relative harmony. The parties may seal their reconciliation rhetorically with images, symbolic enactments,
narratives, etc.
allows for a variety of “rectilinear” forms in the outworking
of truth, grace, peace/harmony, and justice. The four terms
may be addressed in any order, but attention to any one of
them will implicate all the others within a situation. If any
of the terms is ignored or suppressed from a party’s discourse, reconciliation will tend to break down, because they
are ethically interdependent. In response, some rhetor will
begin to emphasize the suppressed term in order to correct
the situation. The danger, however, is that the terms become
polarized against each other in the public discourse rather
than conjoined. Until someone recognizes, and convinces
others, that the terms are interdependent in the pursuit of
a moral community, coherent reconciliation will be impossible, and neither justice nor peace will be achieved in any
lasting way.94
The third (upper) pyramid, representing the mediating
agent(s)/agency(-ies) of reconciliation, is certainly an oversimplification. This might be a third-party mediator that
expresses the logology of reconciliation in word and practice while guiding the parties through the process. It may
also be a member of one of the parties, whose vision and
actions largely transcend allegiance to that party (e.g., Desmond Tutu presiding over the TRC). But this pyramid also
stands for common or converging beliefs/visions/myths of
reconciliation. A religion shared by participants is a possible
source of this common vision; a secular story of a common
cultural hero is also a possibility. Or, the parties may not
share a common representation of the logology of reconciliation yet identify with separate figures or stories whose embodiments of these terms are similar enough logologically
to enable reconciliation. Furthermore, such visions/stories of
reconciliation may not exist in totality beforehand; rhetorparticipants may creatively construct their own vision of
reconciliation from elements in their cultural heritage and
current situation as they progressively respond to the exigence for reconciliation. What the theory suggests above all
is that coherent reconciliation draws its agency from visions/
narratives that restore the full dialogic-dialectic interplay of
grace, truth, justice, and relational harmony.
To use South Africa as an example, during the mid-1980s,
“justice” (the dismantling of apartheid and granting equal
rights to non-whites) became pitted against “reconciliation”
(as a term for restoring harmony under the status quo) in the
public discourse about apartheid. In the pursuit of justice, the
African National Congress escalated its violent resistance to
the apartheid system as the government had stepped up its
efforts to stamp out all opposition. Amid the violence, some
church leaders issued cries for “reconciliation,” meaning the
cessation of violence. Yet the theologians who came together
to draft the Kairos Document recognized that reconciliation
apart from justice is shallow and immoral. They held out the
hope of reconciliation, but only on condition that the unjust
system be dismantled. On the other hand, Desmond Tutu,
with his rhetoric of the “rainbow nation” and ubuntu, leaned
toward the notion that the fundamental, interdependent humanity of blacks and whites, perpetrators and victims, called
for a reconciliation that would honor this shared humanity and be the first step of a cooperative effort to dismantle
apartheid and build a just society.95 Despite the difference in
priority between the two visions, both were built on a coherent vision of reconciliation, in which grace, truth, harmony,
and justice would ultimately be honored and implemented
together. Both were needed for depth of vision in the struggle to end the violence and the unjust order.
Reconciliation in Time: Temporal Priority, Narrative, and Ritual
Similarly, the priority of grace vs. the other elements may
vary with the situation. The trauma of direct victimization
This dialogological, ethico-moral model of reconciliation
16
in a situation like apartheid tends to strip the victim of a
sense of agency and create fear of further violence. Schreiter’s model of individual reconciliation suggests that the first
need for such victims is an experience of peace and harmony—the presence of a caring community or individual in a
secure environment. In the context of relational and physical
peace, the victim can safely begin to unravel the knots of
traumatic truth—the memories of the painful experience—
and gain a sense of agency over them. If the process of intra-reconciliation reaches fruition, the victim finds grace to
face the victimizer in a way that reconciles (if the victimizer
reciprocates), honoring both justice and relation. In fact, the
victim’s demonstration of grace may precede and provoke
the perpetrator’s repentance. However, to require forgiveness before there is sufficient opportunity to work through
such a process diminishes the victim’s need for agency in
forgiveness as an expression of grace rather than intimidation or compulsion. For this reason, it may be appropriate
for the repentant perpetrator to make restitution or reparation
in some way before asking forgiveness. But if forgiveness is
demanded after reparation has been made, once again, the
logology of reconciliation has been fragmented or distorted.
No amount of reparation can “buy” the grace of forgiveness.
If the repentant party demonstrates an understanding of this
truth and exemplifies grace in the reparation process, however, it may help the victim find the grace to forgive.
transcending them in the pursuit of harmony. In some way,
the hero ultimately emerges victorious over the world’s fragmentation, even through death. The enemies who enthrone
some lesser value at the head of the social hierarchy are deposed (or at least exposed as pretenders), while the truly transcendent value(s) embodied by the hero becomes exalted as
ultimate.96 The theory set forth here claims that participants
in reconciliation will almost always identify with such heroic figures, drawing grace and direction from their stories.
Importantly, such figures and stories often embody religious
commitments or overtones. While it is inappropriate in a liberal democracy for the government to sanction a particular
religious tradition as the arbiter of reconciliation, there is
nothing to preclude the power of religious narratives in mediating the process for individuals and groups who hold to a
religious faith or providing a cultural prefiguration of reconciliation that various agents may pluralistically appropriate
as they configure reconciliation together. Similarly, recent
scholarship amply demonstrates that Judeo-Christian discourse was thoroughly interwoven with the rhetorical work
of the civil rights movement in the U.S.97
Configuring reconciliation requires not only narrative,
but ritual elements as well. In the ritual enactment of reconciliation, participants themselves become the agents in
a drama, creating their own story of reconciliation as they
redeem themselves from a history of injustice and conflict.
A ritual involving representatives of both parties (as opposed to a single speech of apology, for example) increases
the potential for reconciliation to be coherent and broadly
meaningful. It does not guarantee, however, that the rhetors
will adequately forge connections between the ritual and the
ongoing historical realities it is meant to remedy. The symbolism of reconciliation is more likely to transform social
realities positively if it is performed within the context of a
larger process of dialectic and dialogue among representatives of the parties (including representatives of subgroups
whose viewpoints are not dominant within a given group)—
for example, the talks that enabled the negotiated transition
and the work of the TRC in South Africa. Dialogue and dialectic are needed for grounding repentance and forgiveness
in truth, for orchestrating the ritual(s) of reconciliation, and
for working on social transformation (e.g., reparation or reconstruction) in the aftermath.
Historical, mythical, or visionary narratives and images
are essential to these processes. Beyond their poetic qualities, their rhetorical function is to infuse members of both
sides with the “grace of catharsis” (tragic redemption) and
the “grace of statement” (especially of comic transcendence)
they need to do their part toward reconciliation. Likewise,
in enacting reconciliation, the structure and balance of ritual helps keep all the elements together, as we have seen.
Because of its liminal quality, ritual, like literature, makes
it possible to express the reconciliation cluster/cycle in its
“timeless perfection” while working through it sequentially
with reference to the historical situation.
In a reconciliation narrative, some heroic agent works
through the cycle tragicomically, exhibiting grace while
exposing the truth about a society, and willingly suffering
society’s injustices in the pursuit of social justice while also
17
As Figure 6 (above) suggests, then, the public enactment of reconciliation is likely to follow a stable sequence
of rhetorical acts, although the logology of reconciliation itself does not demand such a sequence. The sequential forms
of reconciliation—both inspirational narrative and ritual
drama—are bridges between the “timeless” totality of the
truth-grace-justice-harmony cluster and the lived historical
reality of the relationship being reconciled. Therefore, in
its sequential forms, it is natural that reconciliation would
start with an awareness or analysis of the ugly truth about
a relationship and work from there. In the public ritual of
reconciliation, it is generally most fitting and satisfying if the
perpetrator takes the lead in facing the truth, acknowledging wrongdoing, expressing regret, and taking responsibility for it. If history is muddy on this point, and both sides
have wounded each other over many generations, then the
logology of reconciliation allows them to focus on the larger
project of graciously balancing truth, harmony, and justice
concerns without belaboring questions about who started the
conflict or who should bear the greater blame.
human transcendence – perhaps settling for vicarious experiences of reconciliation through the stories of reconciling
heroes while failing to engage the messy realities of one’s
own social situation. This challenge returns our attention to
the conversation and conflict between religious and secular
approaches to reconciliation, which logology mediates but
does not eliminate.
Conclusion
Arguably, then, religious knowledge/practice lends itself
to motivating transformation better than philosophy, and it
tends to express rhetorical/symbolic coherence better than
the secular, democratic politics of debate and dissent.98 At
the same time, this coherence may remove it further from
correspondence with the data of daily experience in a disjointed world. Religion offers an “ought” that can seem
too far removed from the “is” to be applicable. No doubt,
it is inspiring to envision a reality in which truth and grace
embrace each other, and “peace and justice have kissed;”
in transitional politics, however, the urgent matter is simply getting these voices together to talk and negotiate – no
small feat when they have become polarized, even divorced
by the forces of oppression and violence. The value of religion, then, lies not in guiding direct action, but in providing
a background orientation that checks the push of power in
the pragmatic realm of secular politics. It provides a horizon
or prophetic vision of the ultimate good while also guarding
against social actors mistaking their program of reconciliation or transitional justice, and its implementation, for that
good. It is essential that religion and politics be kept distinct
Religion is concerned with the ethical and with the “chief
end” of human beings. Burke shows that the rhetoric of religion takes language to the end of the line; it perfects or
“maxes out” humans’ languaging capacity for orienting
themselves in, and ordering, the world. When faced by the
extreme disjuncture between justice and peace in South
Africa, for instance, many resort to religion as the realm
in which tensions between justice and peace are ultimately
worked out. Unlike philosophy, religion does not try to work
out the tensions abstractly or rationally, but works them out
temporally and incarnationally through ritual, story, and image, often producing catharsis and healing. (Theology then
abstracts out of the story and practices the implicit eternal
essences – e.g., the Trinity.)
Analyzing reconciliation logologically in terms of truth,
grace, peace/harmony, and justice (variously addressed or
expressed depending on the party and context) allows the
observer/critic to examine how (much) a given instance of
reconciliation discourse attends to, and is oriented by, each
of these four terms (and their cognates and inflections) in
relation to each other and the rhetorical situation. Certainly,
treating reconciliation as a cycle of terms is, in itself, a transcending step that places us at one remove from performing
reconciliation. This move inherently and implicitly places
human agency (the capacity for narrative action in/on the
world) atop reconciliation. The fact that a specific quality of agency (grace) is one of the terms within the cycle
suggests that agency, too, can become the focal point of an
orientation to the world that needs to be checked by other
orientations. In other words, one can make too much of human power to change the world. This would be the romantic
temptation: to ignore (or make light of) the realities of the
historical-political situation while investing faith in super18
– and in dialogue. By increasing the distance between the
two, religious discourse can enlarge the scope of deliberation about how to promote “the ‘good life,’ with and for others, in just institutions.”99
sacred understanding of reconciliation to pressing a model
of confession, forgiveness, and transcendence on a watching nation. Faith in the power of human agency to transcend
(rather than punish) horrific crimes would seem to rest on
thin ice unless grounded in some faith that the world is created and sustained by a transcendent Being who ultimately sets
the world to right and puts it in good order. Not all citizens
share such a sanguine faith, nor does such faith render all
individuals equally ready to forgive those who have irrevocably harmed them. Who has the right to demand transcendence of another who has suffered beyond speaking? And
there remains the question of how to maintain a modicum
of justice now, in a secular age of democratic states where
religious bodies’ power to impose their divine sanctions and
sacrifices on others is, thankfully, kept at bay.
For Christian theologians in particular, such deliberation
is meaningless apart from the ministry of reconciliation because individuals and institutions in the present world system find themselves caught up in the violent, violating cycle
of defining themselves over against the Other (especially
the Divine). On this view, reconciliation is a prerequisite to
establishing the peaceable kingdom of God. From this side
of the logological coin, reconciliation appears substantial,
thick, as real currency that funds the restoration of human
society. On the secular/political side, however, reconciliation
may be mere appearance or form, a thin, regulative ideal with
no substance but the faith social actors currently invest in it.
Tutu’s contribution to South Africa’s democratic transition
lay both in his faith that reconciliation is backed by ontological gold and his unflagging determination that reconciliation be the coin of the new realm.100 Together with Nelson
Mandela’s example of forgiving and joining forces with his
former oppressors, Tutu’s faith in reconciliation’s currency
of exchange – truth, contrition, and the justice of public exposure in exchange for amnesty, forgiveness, and the possibility of living together in peace – worked to establish a
new South African ethos of ubuntu in place of apartheid.
Tutu was speaking this ethos into being long before the fall
of apartheid, and perhaps he alone embodied it substantially
enough to preside over its public-private performance in the
TRC’s secular-sacred rituals of confession and absolution.
Still, where social agents have lost faith in the workings
of present power structures to bring about good, reconciliation as a religious metaphor may frame political discourse
about violence and its end in a way that restores “working
faith in the works of words” (to use Doxtader’s phrase).101
A secular logology of reconciliation appropriates a form of
ethical discourse out of reconciliation theology for its heuristic value in understanding (and perhaps guiding) rhetorical practice, particularly the kinds of “talks about talks” and
negotiations that occur in political reconciliation. The spirit
of reconciliation displayed by leaders and citizens of faith
can reanimate a disenchanted public with fresh visions of
human potential for creating a common good; it may also
heighten their disillusionment when the realpolitik of reconciliation achieves little more than the lesser of two evils (e.g.,
South Africa’s present socioeconomic apartheid and disorderly peace in place of political apartheid and the bloodbath
it nearly engendered). Yet disillusionment need not have the
final word; this is the promise of reconciliation in the thick
of a faith tradition.
Yet Tutu’s strength was also a political weakness. His
reconciling ethos and faith were of a fundamentally Christian character; yet he called a nation of deep racial, cultural,
economic, and religious disparities to enter into the thick of
reconciliation so conceived, laden with the weight of divine
grace, messianic promise, redemptive sacrifice, and unconditional forgiveness. It is one thing to call a church congregation, or even a village or clan with a shared religious tradition, to live into the drama of a divine history and destiny.
To expect the same of a pluralistic, secular state is another
matter. To some extent, Tutu’s presence conflated the two; it
appeared to go beyond informing transitional politics with a
The spiritual substance of reconciliation may not only
help establish the conditions for transitional democracy; it
may also fund efforts toward a deeper, more substantial level
of social transformation, especially when dissatisfaction with
the outcome of political transformation endures, generations
after its occurrence. In the U.S., not only did the religious
faith and reconciling spirit of civil rights leaders (such as
19
Martin Luther King, Jr.) move a nation to abolish legal discrimination two generations ago; now, such religious visions
of reconciliation energize church, para-church, community,
and national initiatives to restore moral coherence to race
relations through atonement for past wrongs (whose effects
still persist, long since the laws changed). A (dia)logology
of reconciliation keeps the door open to the power of the
Word(s) at work in such efforts – whether secular or religious.
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), George Yancey,
Beyond Black and White: Reflections on Racial Reconciliation
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996), Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Peterson, eds., Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion,
Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 2001).
4
For example, in 2005 Tutu participated in a BBC production of a TRC-type encounter between selected victims and
perpetrators of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; he also spoke in
Greensboro, North Carolina to lend his support to the efforts of
the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ronald A.
Wells, “Facing Truth: A Televised Reconciliation in Northern Ireland,” Christian Century, 27 June 2006, Dan Galindo, “Power to
Heal: Justice That Reconciles Is Essential, Tutu Says,” WinstonSalem Journal, 4 November 2005.
5
For a thorough explication of Tutu’s ubuntu theology, see
Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu.
6
For example, David Crocker methodically critiques
Tutu’s conception of reconciliation/ubuntu as versus retribution.
David A. Crocker, “Punishment, Reconciliation , and Democratic
Deliberation,” in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation, ed. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
7
In more than one poll, a majority of South Africans indicated that the TRC process worsened, rather than improved,
race relations. See Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New
York: Three Rivers, 2000), 385, Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable
Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30, 37, 156.
8
For example, citing Philippe Salazar’s account of the
South African transition, Kirt Wilson points out that reconciliation there did not substantially reduce material inequality between
whites and blacks and has actually served the economic interests
of the white establishment. Philippe-Joseph Salazar, An African
Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), Kirt H. Wilson, “Is
There an Interest in Reconciliation?,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7
(2004).
9
Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, 80. The other two
“active ordained ministers” named in No Future are the Right Reverend Bongani Finca and Dr. Khoza Mgojo (75).
10
Ibid., 80-81.
11
Two recent works demonstrate the centrality of JudeoChristian discourse to the civil rights movement: David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim
Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon, eds., Rhetoric, Religion, and
the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, vol. 1, Studies in Rhetoric
and Religion (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006).
12
John B. Hatch, “Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation
and Apologies for Slavery,” Western Journal of Communication 70
(2006).
13
Roy L. Brooks, “The New Patriotism and Apology for
Slavery,” in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconcili-
Notes
1
Erik Doxtader, “Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/
ion,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 267.
2
———, “Making Rhetorical History in a Time of Transition: The Occasion, Constitution, and Representation of South African Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4 (2001), Doxtader, “Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/ion.”
3
Authors writing out of the Christian faith tradition in
particular have produced a plethora of books addressing reconciliation, especially with respect to race: Michael Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (Cleveland: Pilgrim,
1997), Tony Campolo and Michael Battle, The Church Enslaved:
A Spirituality of Racial Reconciliation (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2005), Curtiss P. DeYoung, Reconciliation: Our Greatest Challenge -- Our Only Hope (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1997), Tony
Evans, Let’s Get to Know Each Other (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1995), Samuel George Hines and Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Beyond Rhetoric: Reconciliation as a Way of Life (Valley Forge, PA:
Judson, 2000), Mary McAleese, Love in Chaos: Spiritual Growth
and the Search for Peace in Northern Ireland (New York: Continuum, 1999), Dennis L. Okholm, ed., The Gospel in Black and
White: Theological Resources for Racial Reconciliation (Downers
Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1997), William E. Pannell, The Coming
Race Wars? A Cry for Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993), Andrew Sung Park, Racial Conflict and Healing: An
Asian-American Theological Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1996), John Perkins and III Thomas Tarrants, He’s My Brother:
Former Racial Foes Offer Strategy for Reconciliation (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen, 1994), Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice, More
Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel (Downers
Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1993), Robert J. Schreiter, The Ministry of
Reconciliation: Spirituality and Strategies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
1998), Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness
in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Desmond
Mpilo Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological
Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1996), Raleigh Washington and Glen Kehrein, Breaking Down Walls: A Model for Reconciliation in an Age of Racial
Strife (Chicago: Moody, 1993), Ronald A. Wells, People Behind
the Peace: Community and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland
20
ation, ed. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2006), Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004).
Speech 78 (1992).
25
John Stewart and Karen J. Williams argue that, although
Burke moved toward a coherent understanding of humans as “bodies that learn language,” he never entirely broke with the simple
dualism of language vs. world (symbolicity vs. animality or action
vs. motion). See chapter 7 in Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact, Kenneth Burke, “Poem,” in The Legacy of Kenneth Burke,
ed. Herbert W. Simons and Trevor Melia (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989), 263.
14
John Stewart and Karen J. Williams recognize Burke’s
great value as a rhetorical theorist in this respect; however, they
critique him as a would-be systematic philosopher of language
and warn theorists to use his work with caution, arguing that his
modernist commitment to the symbol (rather than interaction or
“articulate contact”) as a model of language tends to overshadow
his more coherent, post-semiotic insights. See chapter 7 in John
Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact: Toward a Post-Semiotic
Philosophy of Communication (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1995).
26
Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man,” in Language as
Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
27
The phrase “salvation through knowledge” is Rueckert’s
characterization of Burke’s project. William H. Rueckert, Kenneth
Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
15
Kenneth Burke, “Dramatism,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: MacMillan, 1968), Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies
in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
28
29
Similarly, one may follow Molefi Asante’s Afrocentric
notion of language as nommo, the creative word that enables humans to “create harmony and balance in the midst of disharmony
and indecision.” According to Asante, African societies tend to assume that all things are interconnected, and the human task is to
discover and recover harmony, within and without, through language. Molefi K. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, Rev. and exp. ed.
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 46.
16
See Kenneth Burke, “Terministic Screens,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).
17
Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 15.
18
Ibid., vi.
19
Ibid., 30.
20
Ibid., 33.
21
Ibid., 258.
Stewart, Language as Articulate Contact.
30
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,”
in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
22
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), xi.
31
Ibid.
32
———, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, University of Texas
Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
23
Invoking the metaphor of center (especially a logo-center) raises a red flag in light of postmodern critique. However, I
concur with Raymie E. McKerrow that an adequate response to
modernity is not to discard it altogether, but to hold its centripetal
gravitation in tension with postmodern pushes toward the peripheral, the plural, the physical, and the radically contingent: “Modernity needs the postmodern to keep it off balance; postmodernism
needs modernity to recenter itself from time to time.” Raymie E.
McKerrow, “Opening the Future: Postmodern Rhetoric in a Multicultural World,” in Rhetoric in Intercultural Contexts, ed. Alberto
González and Dolores V. Tanno, International and Intercultural
Communication Annual (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999), 43. If the
reader prefers, the proposed (dia)logology of reconciliation may
be regarded as one core of a discursive “binary star” or even “multiple star” whose component stars orbit around one another. Such
an account would take it further in the direction of a Bakhtinian
universe of dialogic interactions with multiple, contingent centers.
For a helpful overview of Bakhtinian dialogism as a whole and
Bakhtin’s focus on the relationship of center and not-center in particular, see Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World,
2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14-39.
33
Burke’s response to the monistic and deterministic thinking that dominated his day was dramatism, a humanistic counterstatement to “objective” reality. The pentad is a sort of multi-sided
dialectic involving the interplay of five dramatistic terms (comprising the range of basic linguistic motives of human behavior)
which, Burke says, arise out a “central moltenness” of human motivation. Just as the dramatist sees all the conflicting motives and
acts of a play’s characters as necessary and interdependent parts
of an underlying unity, so Burke’s dramatistic dialectics involve
an ironical juxtaposition of opposing/incongruous perspectives in
the pursuit of greater fullness and coherence. This comic dialectic,
which he calls “perspective by incongruity,” has clear resonances
with Bakhtin’s notions of polyphony and carnival. See Kenneth
Burke, Attitudes toward History, 3d ed. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xix, Mikhail M.
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
34
24
For important critiques by Burke scholars, see James W.
Chesebro, “Extensions of the Burkeian System,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992), Celeste Michelle Condit, “Post-Burke:
Transcending the Sub-Stance of Dramatism,” Quarterly Journal of
Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 181.
35
See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen
Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 180-94.
36
21
Melton faults Burke’s “redemption” as scarcely more
than a punctuation mark at the end of a deterministic cycle of
Order, unlike many biblical images of redemption as a free act
of familial or human compassion and justice. See John Matthew
Melton, “Logology, Entelechy, and Rhetorical Piety: A Critique
and Expansion of Burkeian Terms” (Dissertation, Regent University, 1995).
37
See for example Battle, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu, Michael G. Cartwright, “Wrestling with
Scripture: Can Euro-American Christians and African-American
Christians Learn to Read Scripture Together?,” in The Gospel in
Black and White: Theological Resources for Racial Reconciliation, ed. Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity,
1997), DeYoung, Reconciliation: Our Greatest Challenge -- Our
Only Hope, Helmick and Peterson, eds., Forgiveness and Reconciliation, Hines and DeYoung, Beyond Rhetoric: Reconciliation as
a Way of Life, Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness.
38
For example, see Stanley S. Harakas, “Forgiveness &
Reconciliation: An Orthodox Perspective,” in Forgiveness and
Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation, ed. Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Peterson (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation, 2001). 39
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 172.
40
In developing this notion of a “narrative unity of life,”
Ricoeur’s work intersects with that of Alasdair MacIntyre – an intersection Ricoeur acknowledges. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984), Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 157-61.
41
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 170-71.
42
Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 5-10. See also Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 194.
43
John Wall, “Moral Meaning: Beyond the Good and the
Right,” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, ed.
John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 54.
44
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1971).
45
Although Ricoeur draws upon Rawls’s theory in explicating his understanding of the moral norm, he places the moral
norm in a position of “subordination and complementarity” to the
ethical aim toward the good. See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 170,
230-39.
46
Ibid., 290.
47
Burke, Attitudes toward History.
48
Ibid, Barry Brummett, “Burkean Comedy and Tragedy,
Illustrated in Reactions to the Arrest of John Delorean,” Central
States Speech Journal 35 (1984). See also John B. Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge from Complicity to Coherence in the
Rhetoric of Race Relations,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003).
49
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 165.
50
Eric K. Yamamoto, Interracial Justice: Conflict & Reconciliation in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: New York
University Press, 1999), 163.
51
For example, in the wake of centuries of racial preju-
dice and oppression in America, there is a polarization between
(mostly black) discourses that essentialize racial difference/injustice and (mostly white) rhetoric that trumpets the end of racism in
an era of color-blindness. McPhail’s work critiques both of them
as fallacious: Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Complicity: The Theory
of Negative Difference,” The Howard Journal of Communications
3 (1991), Mark Lawrence McPhail, “From Complicity to Coherence: Rereading the Rhetoric of Afrocentricity,” Western Journal of
Communication 62 (1998), Mark Lawrence McPhail, “Passionate
Intensity: Louis Farrakhan and the Fallacies of Racial Reasoning,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998), Mark Lawrence McPhail,
The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation?
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), Mark Lawrence
McPhail, “Race and the (Im)Possibility of Dialogue,” in Dialogue:
Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, ed. Rob Anderson, Leslie A. Baxter, and Kenneth N. Cissna (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2004).
52
I borrow the phrase “dance of agency” from Aaron D.
Gresson, III, America’s Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy of Healing (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
In a similar vein, Ricoeur addresses agency implicitly in terms of
the self’s attestation: “the assurance of being oneself acting and
suffering.” Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 22.
53
In the Christian narrative, Christ’s sacrifice both highlights the world’s brokenness (which breaks his body) and displays
a revolutionary wholeness that breaks into the moral incoherence
of the world. His life and death provide a glimpse of what could
and should be, inspiring others who follow Him to do the same.
54
John B. Hatch, “Reconciliation as a Tragicomic Corrective: From Racial Offense to Rhetorical Coherence” (Ph.D. dissertation, Regent University, 2003).
55
Numerous other dialectics can be identified in the literature, among them symbolic vs. substantive transformation (e.g.,
“mere rhetoric” vs. “real” economic or political reform) and remembering vs. forgetting wrongs. Regarding the former, I take
a post-semiotic view in which the symbol-substance dichotomy
breaks down (i.e., words are material in the pursuit of justice, and
material/political correctives function as rhetorical appeals to accept that the terms of justice have been satisfied). As for remembering vs. forgetting, I treat this dialectic under the rubric of the
grace-truth dialectic.
56
Doxtader, “Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/ion,”
285.
57
In his definition of irony, Burke describes something akin
to polyphony among terms: “Irony arises when one tries, by the
interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development
which uses all of the terms. Hence, from the standpoint of this total
form (this ‘perspective of perspectives’), none of the participating ‘sub-perspectives’ can be treated as either precisely right or
precisely wrong. They are all voices, or personalities, or positions,
integrally affecting one another.” Burke, Grammar, 512.
58
Psalm 85:10.
59
John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of
Peace, 1997), 28.
22
60
Ibid., 29.
61
Ibid., 30.
62
Crocker, “Punishment,” 65.
77
Ricoeur, The Just, 8.
78
See Charles Villa-Vicencio, “Restorative Justice: Dealing
with the Past Differently,” in Looking Back, Reaching Forward:
Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South
Africa, ed. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd (Cape
Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, 2000).
79
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 203.
80
Ricoeur discusses the place of tragedy in the ethical realization of the self at length in the ninth study in Oneself as Another.
81
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 152.
82
See chapter 8 of Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans.
Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, vol. 3 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1988).
83
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission recognized four layers of truth (1) factual or forensic truth,
(2) personal or narrative truth, (3) social or “dialogue” truth, and
(4) healing or restorative truth. Colin Bundy, “The Beast of the
Past: History and the TRC,” in After the TRC: Reflections on Truth
and Reconciliation in South Africa, ed. James Wilmot and Linda
van de Vijver (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).
84
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957). (See
third essay.)
85
Schreiter uses the terms “individual” reconciliation and
“social” reconciliation to designate these differing phenomena and
treats of individual reconciliation (for at least a “cadre” of people)
as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for social reconciliation. I favor the terms intra-reconciliation and inter-reconciliation,
respectively, since both forms of reconciliation pertain to collectives as well as individuals. Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation.
86
Erik Doxtader, “Reconciliation in a State of Emergency:
The Middle Voice of 2 Corinthians,” Journal for the Study of Religion 14 (2001): 51.
87
For one articulation of this perspective, see Schreiter,
The Ministry of Reconciliation, 19.
88
For in-depth exploration of this problem, see McPhail,
Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, Aaron D. Gresson, III, The Recovery
of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995).
89
Hatch, “Reconciliation as a Tragicomic Corrective”.
90
Schreiter, The Ministry of Reconciliation, 116.
91
This model assumes that the agent of reconciliation exemplifies human wholeness and a “well-rounded” accounting of
human motives, as Burke would say. Interacting with this rounded,
holistic quality of humanity in the Other would tend to open the
victim/izer’s thinking to bridging terms and perspectives outside
those conditioned by the oppositional relationships of oppressor vs. oppressed, superior vs. inferior, or peace vs. justice. Lisa
Schirch points out the value of simple activities like sharing a meal
together for beginning to relate outside the frame of conflict-habituated identity. Lisa Schirch, “Ritual Reconciliation: Transforming Identity/Reframing Conflict,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and
63
Crocker sees “democratic reciprocity” as a second,
“thicker” conception of reconciliation. Ibid., 68.
64
Such was the case with Rep. Tony Hall’s proposed congressional apology for slavery 1997 and Benin president Mathieu
Kérékou’s decision to host a reconciliation conference to heal the
wounds of the slave trade in 1999. It is also evidenced in Brooks’s
insistence on a “moral apology” for slavery premised on “deep
remorse,” as distinct from a “political apology,” which he says
“can emerge within the normal flow of civil rights advancements
that have the peculiar habit of appearing primarily during times of
large-scale wars.” Hatch, “Reconciliation as a Tragicomic Corrective”, Hatch, “Beyond Apologia: Racial Reconciliation and Apologies for Slavery.”, Brooks, “The New Patriotism,” 214.
65
For an example of such a view, see Rodney L. Peterson, “A Theology of Forgiveness: Terminology, Rhetoric, & the
Dialectic of Interfaith Relationships,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation,
ed. Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Peterson (Philadelphia:
Templeton Foundation, 2001).
66
To extend the molecular metaphor, each key term as an
“atom” of reconciliation is actually a constellation of “electrons”
and other particles, a cluster of terms.
67
I have made a similar claim in response to Doxtader’s
critique of formulaic approaches to reconciliation. Erik Doxtader,
“The Potential of Reconciliation’s Beginning: A Reply,” Rhetoric
& Public Affairs 7 (2004), John B. Hatch, “The Hope of Reconciliation: Continuing the Conversation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9
(2006).
68
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, 54.
69
Ibid., x.
70
Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in
A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
71
I favor the term grace over mercy (which John Paul Lederach uses) because of its clearer connection to notions of agency,
the power of the word and narrative (e.g., in Burke’s notion of
secular grace), and honoring justice while not enforcing it strictly.
72
Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 16.
73
While Burke writes of a “rhetoric of catharsis” and “rhetoric of statement,” William H. Rueckert (one of Burke’s interpreters) appears to be responsible for substituting Burke’s notion of
“grace” for “rhetoric” in these phrases. Kenneth Burke, CounterStatement, 2d ed. (Los Altos, California: Hermes Publications,
1953), Rueckert, Kenneth Burke.
74
Doxtader, “Making Rhetorical History,” 226, 39.
75
See ———, “Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/ion,”
280-82..
76
Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, Battle, Reconciliation: The
Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu, Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness.
23
Coexistence: Theory and Practice, ed. Mohammed Abu-Nimer
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2001).
92
For example, Californian Amy Biehl, a Fulbright scholar
in South Africa who had long been involved in anti-apartheid activism, was, ironically, killed in anti-white mob violence in a black
township. Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, 152-53.
93
The former is expressed, for example, in Romans 2:4:
“[D]o you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance,
and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward
repentance?” The latter is conveyed in Proverbs 3:34: “[God]
mocks proud mockers but gives grace to the humble.”
94
A prime example of how a polarized view of the terms
can derail reconciliation is the firestorm of criticisms that followed
Rep. Tony Hall’s proposal for a Congressional apology for slavery.
Critics on the left saw the apology as a ploy to cut off demands
for reparation (i.e., seeking harmony at the expense of justice),
while critics on the right saw it merely as setting the stage for a
national reparations initiative. See Hatch, “Reconciliation: Building a Bridge.”
95
This synopsis of the differing perspectives derives from
Doxtader, “Making Rhetorical History,” 229-33.
96
For example, Jesus requests forgiveness for his executioners, even on the cross; from the grave, he rises again to release
saving grace into the world, ascending to the throne of heaven after
imparting this grace to his disciples, who are then to become “ministers of reconciliation” by message and example wherever they
go. Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance and suffering in the pursuit of
justice unites Indians in a quest to be free of British rule; in this
mission, he succeeds, though he dies by the hand of one who opposes his vision of Muslim-Hindu solidarity. Martin Luther King,
Jr. suffers police brutality and imprisonment in the pursuit of equal
rights for blacks within a racially integrated society, ultimately dying for his cause yet leaving behind the legacy of a loving commitment to rectify race relations in the US without reprisals.
97
See Chappell, A Stone of Hope, Houck and Dixon, eds.,
Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement.
98
In her insightful exploration of the debates over apologies for historical societal wrongs, Danielle Celermajer observes
that religious traditions fill a gap in modern secular politics (which
focus on the rights of individuals) because they readily recognize
a “pervasive, underlying ethos” of society that comprises its “collective soul” and bears responsibility for cultural wrongs. Danielle Celermajer, “The Apology in Australia: Re-Covenanting the
National Imaginary,” in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and
Reconciliation, ed. Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006).
99
For example, in South Africa, Desmond Tutu’s vision of
reconciliation was not realized, yet such visions did create a space
for deliberation and negotiation toward a democracy in which reconciliation was not simply impossible or unthinkable.
100 Tutu himself uses the coin/currency metaphor for reconciliation in Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, 80.
101 Doxtader, “Reconciliation--a Rhetorical Concept/ion,”
284.
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