Stepping back and placing the three lenses through which we have been looking against each other, the apology we now have before us looks quite different from the one we assumed we knew at the beginning. No longer a singular type of speech act whose natural home is personal relationships or the darkened confessional, it now comes into view as a complex repertoire of possible types of speech act. Most importantly, within that repertoire is the ‘re-covenanting apology’. In this guise, the apology is, in its first movement, an acknowledgement of a collective failure to live up to an ideal ethical principle and, in its second, a public, performative declaration of a new commitment, a new covenant for now and into the future.

Still, for apology's (potential) political dimension to be catalysed in real time requires the right context, both at the level of social and political conditions and in terms of people's proclivity to receive it according to this interpretive trope. To this end, we have already identified a canny symmetry between apology's attention to collective responsibility and the deficit or gap in the standard repertoire of strategies for dealing with the systematic violations in nations' pasts bequeathed by a liberal secular political understanding of responsibility. As valuable as the liberal institutions of individual justice have been in pinpointing and prosecuting direct individual responsibility, they have nevertheless occluded the silent and supportive collective from our institutional vision and lacked the emotive theatricality required to bring the polity along into a new political ethic.