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Receiving René Girard into the Académie Française
- Michigan State University Press
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vi Contents 131 Eucharisto, René Girard: Searching for a Pacifist Theology, JacquesJude Lépine 139 The Way to More Insight and Personal Freedom, Sonja Pos 147 Girard, Buddhism, and the Psychology of Desire, Eugene Webb 159 Magister Lucis: In the Light of René Girard, James G. Williams 169 Breakout from the Belly of the Beast, Robert Hamerton-Kelly 179 On Paper and in Person, Gil Bailie 189 Drawn into Conversion: How Mimetic Theory Changed My Way of Being a Christian Theologian, Wolfgang Palaver 199 For René Girard: In Appreciation, Richard J. Golsan 211 Dispatch from the Girardian Boundary, Charles Mabee 223 Things Still Hidden…, Anthony Bartlett 235 The Mimeticist Turn: Lessons from Early Girard, Chris Allen Carter 247 Sacrifice and Sexual Difference: Insights and Challenges in the Work of René Girard, Martha Reineke 259 “The Key of Knowledge”: A Brief and Entirely Insufficient Account of a Discovery, Giuseppe Fornari 265 Mimetic Theory and Christian Theology in the Twenty-first Century, Michael E. Hardin 273 René Girard’s Hermeneutic: Discovery and Pedagogy, Tyler Graham 283 About the Editors and Contributors Preface René Girard’s entrance into the French Academy on December 15, 2005, brings to realization a sense that many of us who have worked with him (and his ideas) over the years have long felt. The aura is all about him. In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, he has hit upon the origin of culture. Of culture itself. Its origin. The way culture began, the way it continues to organize itself. The way communities of human beings structure themselves in a manner that is different from other living species on the planet. Like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Martin Buber, or others who have changed the way we think in the humanities or in the human sciences, René Girard has put forth a set of ideas about mimetic desire, about the scapegoat mechanism, and about the role of Jewish and Christian Scripture in explaining sacrifice, violence, and the crises from which our culture has been born, crises that have altered our perceptions of the world in which we function. We will never be able to think the same way again. It occurred to some of us who have been working with René in the Colloquium on Violence and Religion since the beginning of the 1990s that it might be useful to collect a volume of essays, not to celebrate his work (that has been done by others), nor even to explain his work (that has also been done), but to bear witness to it; to speak in concrete and specific terms about the way it has influenced our own. Future generations will no doubt determine for themselves whether Girard’s work will prove decisive for the history of Western thought. But for us the verdict is in: those contributing to this volume have no doubt that he will be remembered as one of the geniuses of the post–World War II period, as an individual who confronted the deepest vii viii Preface issues of our time and proposed a way of understanding them, a way that is at once comprehensive and compelling. The first audience for the volume that follows, then, is posterity. The criterion for inviting contributions was simple. We contacted a number of individuals who have worked with René Girard over many years from a variety of the groups that have formed in connection with Girard’s work: his students (at Buffalo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and elsewhere); his colleagues (at those same institutions and elsewhere); the theologians in Austria who have embraced his work; individuals working in France and Canada in the philosophy of science; and a wide variety of individuals ordained in various religious communions who have been drawn to his work and have been attending conferences about it. Our objective was to invite contributors from a wide range of thinking and writing in order to reflect the breadth and depth of Girard’s influence. One exception to this formulation was Tyler Graham, who completed his undergraduate work at Stanford University in 1995. We thought it valuable to include the perspective of one individual who was intensely engaged with Girard in a teacher-student relationship during the years leading up to Girard’s retirement. The twenty-seven responses we received give a fair indication of the spread of Girard’s thought as we move into the twenty-first century. All reflect broad...