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ix Acknowledgments T here are many people without whom this book would not have been possible. The foremost of these is Bill Johnsen of Michigan State University, whom I met fortuitously at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in Montréal in 2009 when the manuscript of the English translation of Girard’s Sacrifice was still in preparation. Following that very brief meeting in the vendors’ hall, Bill generously invited me to Palo Alto for a conference, where I met Girard and two other people who were instrumental in getting this monograph published. The first is Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who was commissioning monographs at the time and encouraged me to submit a proposal to Imitatio. The second is David Dawson , who was in the midst of finishing his own monograph as well as moving his family to Costa Rica but still found time to read, reread, and provide crucial feedback first on the proposal and then on the monograph itself. Through email and Skype, David was my primary interlocutor as I wrote these pages. Others from the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, Imitatio, and the Thiel Foundation who provided one kind of support or another for this project are Isak de Vries, Lindy Fishburne, Jimmy Kaltreider, Andrew McKenna, and Martha Reineke, who also was a great help during the search x Acknowledgments for employment that coincided with the writing of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the input of Noel Sheth of the Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth Pontifical Institute of Philosophy and Religion in Pune, whom I spoke with at the symposium on René Girard and World Religions in Berkeley in April 2011, and express my gratitude to the North Carolina Consortium for South Asian Studies, especially David Gilmartin and Anna Bigelow of NC State University and Afroz Taj and John Caldwell of UNC–Chapel Hill, for a helpful discussion of chapter four at a colloquium in September of 2011. While I take full responsibility for any and all mistakes, I would have made many more of them without the help of Kate McKinney Maddalena, who assisted in my translations from French, and Wendy Doniger, for whose continuing help and support there is not enough gurudakṣiṇā in the three worlds to repay. Finally, this book would probably never have been completed without the support of my parents Darrow Johnson and Jean Hagen-Johnson, my uncle and aunt Dave Lenat and Georgia Hagen, my grandmother Stella Johnson, and my wife Jennifer Ellen Woody Collins, all of whom kept asking about “the book.” ...

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