From the Editor . . .

Since 1993, Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture has followed the research agenda of The Colloquium of Violence and Religion (COV&R), which draws its inspiration from René Girard's mimetic hypothesis elaborated in a stunning series of books he has written over the last 40 years.

The journal's concentration on violence, mimesis, and culture has attracted essays by a distinguished international list of contributors from the fields of conflict resolution; theology; Biblical, Hebrew and Islamic studies; social and biological science; feminism; literary studies in both classical and modern languages; polite and popular culture; art and music; film studies; philosophy; economics; psychology; ecology; pedagogy and educational theory; and rhetoric.

Work published in Contagion has often been surprisingly and hearteningly practical: clinical as well as theoretical psychology, ministry as well as theology, health issues as well as human biology, ecology as well as theoretical physics, scapegoat theory but also disability studies.

To indicate the continuity of Contagion, one cannot do better than to carry forward Robert Hamerton-Kelly's appreciative summary from the inaugural issue in 1993:

Girard's thought has two significant moments, mimetic desire and the surrogate victim. The former causes the problem that the latter solves. The problem is the problem of violence caused by the fact that desire imitates desire and thus inevitably enters into a rivalry of desires, and the latter solves it by causing rival desires to coalesce in a unanimity of violence against a single victim who is surrogate for all potential victims. Thus the victim gives the group the unanimity necessary for culture and generates the category of the sacred with its sub-categories of prohibition, ritual, and myth. "Mimetic" used before desire indicates the imitative and inevitably rivalrous nature of desire, and "metaphysical" indicates that the competition is not simply for some external good but for personal significance understood as substantial being, which we all assume the other to possess. Metaphysical desire is an instance of the Augustinian confession, "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." It is the nemesis of a deviated transcendence. When human desire deviates from its true divine end a metaphysical void opens in us. That void drives us to seek fulfillment from our fellow human beings, whom we mistakenly believe to possess the ontological fullness that we lack. Thus we fall into a war of desire for empty prestige and hollow pre-eminence.

Judith Arias was the first editor of Contagion (1993–1995); giving thanks must always begin with her name. We are especially grateful for the last 10 years under the editorship of Andrew McKenna, the go-to reviewer for all manuscripts on Girard in America. It may be a little unnerving to no longer be writing under his guidance, but the first fruits of his liberation from minding everyone else's work are on pp. 159–182. Andrew joins the Editorial Board as an Advisory Editor; I welcome Ann Astell, Maria Stella Barberi, Giuseppe Fornari, and Michael Kirwan to the Editorial Board, and I thank them for their willingness to serve.

Contagion begins a new phase, published by Michigan State University Press. I want to thank the Offices of the Provost and the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, the College of Arts and Letters, and the Department of English for substantial support to the journal, its editor, and my assistant, Dennis Tyler. I would especially like to thank the Director of MSU Press, Fred C. Bohm, and the Journals staff for guiding me through the publication process. Finally, I thank COV&R for this assignment, their confidence, and support.