“I Am Joseph”

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pp. 3-32

In 1973, Eric Gans wrote that René Girard’s research in anthropology seemed to off er an “Archimedean point” from which the human sciences could one day be rethought.² Gans may have underestimated the case. For what has occurred since Girard began writing in the early 1960s is a veritable...

A Jewish-Christian Dialogue

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pp. 33-56

René Girard’s theory of the uniqueness of Christianity is based upon the theory of the innocent victim. Jesus of Nazareth for Girard is not simply another hero of Greek tragedy who becomes an enemy twin of everyone. Jesus does nothing violent and yet is willing to die to reveal the arbitrariness...

al lo-chamas ’asah (AlthoughHe Had Done No Violence)

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pp. 57-76

This essay has three parts. In the first, I address the concern Willard Swartley expressed when he invited me to participate in the conference from which this material emerged: “I know that one of the liabilities in biblical scholarship appropriating Girard’s work is a potential...

Response by René Girard andReply to René Girard

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pp. 77-92

Unfortunately, I could not attend the symposium at which the papers in the present volume were first presented and discussed. When Professor Willard Swartley, able organizer of this event as well as editor of its proceedings and a participant, kindly sent me all the manuscripts and invited me to comment...

The End of Sacrifice

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pp. 95-116

At a moment when René Girard’s work is beginning to be known by a significantly larger public, a number of us who have been his students or colleagues for a number of years have begun to ask about the dimensions of its impact upon us, in particular, the way it has shaped our...

From Sacrificial Violenceto Responsibility

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pp. 117-138

The word “education,” of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning “to lead out” or “to bring up,” and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To “lead out” implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between...

Reading Religion, Literature,and the End of Desire

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pp. 141-148

Reading Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque again after fifty years, it is hard to forget the thrill of first encounters. “You know, Sancho, that Amadis of Gaul is the most perfect example of knight errantry, of knight chivalry, that ever was.” Cervantes wrote these words? In...

“Nothing Extenuate”

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pp. 149-166

I should say at the outset that I have a particularly personal relation to this play. When I first started to write my doctoral dissertation with René Girard at suny Buff alo in 1972, it was on Shakespeare’s Othello that I started to write, although, in the end, when I turned in my dissertation, I submitted an...

Reading Halachicallyand Aggadically

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pp. 169-186

Professor Kimelman’s talk is a hard act to follow. I also find myself in a difficult situation because this is the first moment in our gathering in which someone who is genuinely from outside the COV&R group has come in to speak to us. So there is always the potential for the activation...

The Self and Other People

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pp. 187-200

One of the “hot” topics in conflict resolution studies over the past thirty years or so has been the introduction of the idea of reconciliation.² The idea behind it is that the resolution of conflict remains temporary as long as we focus exclusively upon the symptomatic issues at hand and that only...

From the Sacred to the Holy

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pp. 201-228

Back to the Future

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pp. 229-242

It has oft en been said that Judaism is about prophetic thinking and Christianity about apocalyptic thinking, and there is, of course, much truth to that claim. But if Judaism reads prophetically, I would maintain, it does so necessarily in the wake of disaster: in order to understand the steps leading up to it, and to foresee new ones lest one fall prey to them accidentally. And...

Conclusions

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pp. 243-258

On the 15th of April in 2011, in a symposium on “René Girard and World Religions,” conducted at the University of California at Berkeley, I delivered a paper on the topic of “Judaism and the Exodus from Archaic Religion.” The planning for the meeting was unique in a...