In a loving, caring community, public confession can be a way of asking for help, knowing that the road might be long and rocky. But all too often in our culture today, the public confession, sometimes written by a frazzled publicist and deployed by a public figure, is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, as if the confession should suffice, without the work of repair or transformation, to bring this figure back into the fabric of society.
