juliann wrote:by the way, "irenic" immediately reminded me of how "apologetic" has become an insult.
This is a fair point, I think, but regrettably juliann had to use it to indulge in another similar swipe--her implicit use of the term "amateur" as an insult. There are many non-professional scholars who have made great or at least respectable contributions in subjects usually reserved for academic interest. One of my teachers in graduate school was a man who had published numerous books and articles (all in highly respected venues) on topics of Greek scholarship, and yet the man is a banker. The man who cracked Linear B, the Bronze Age syllabic script of the Mycenaeans, was an amateur. Mommsen, the great pioneer of Roman Studies, was also a man of politics.
There is, however, a good reason why apologetics has a bad name. The fundamental aim of apologetics, where history is concerned, is to protect a presentist vision of the historical topic at hand. It is not about discovering what happened in the past. Apologists protect institutions that are trading on visions of the past that they hold to be the absolute truth. Any accommodation to new discoveries that challenge their vision of the past will be gradual and grudging. Apologists will fight against the evidence until they have no recourse but to give up a position that is not absolutely necessary to sustain the institution.
We might call the problem of apologetics a war of perspectives on what scholarship should mean. My ideal is that scholarship should be about discovering what we do not know or do not understand as clearly as we might. Apologetics, meaning nothing more than the art of defending, is fundamentally different. It is about protecting turf that has already been mapped out. Naturally, I do not think that this is the best posture for a scholar to take in that apologists are far more successful at thwarting progress than they are at making it.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”