Full Description
In his explorations of the relations between the sacred and violence, René Girard has hit upon the origin of culture—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 that of other species on the planet.
Like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Martin Buber, or others who have changed the way we think in the humanities or in the human sciences, Girard has put forth a set of ideas that have altered our perceptions of the world in which we function. We will never be able to think the same way again 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.
The contributions fall into roughly four areas of interpretive work: religion and religious study; literary study; the philosophy of social science; and psychological studies.
The essays presented here are offered as "essays" in the older French sense of attempts (essayer) or trials of ideas, as indeed Girard has tried out ideas with us. With a conscious echo of Montaigne, then, this hommage volume is titled Essays in Friendship and in Truth.
Contents
Contents
Preface
Receiving René Girard into the Académie Française - Michel Serres
René et moi - Eric Gans
Great Books - Andrew J. McKenna
My Encounter with René Girard - Cesáreo Bandera
My Life with René - Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Detour and Sacrifice: Illich and Girard - Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Already from the Beginning - Paul Dumouchel
Literature, Myth, and Prophecy: Encountering René Girard - Sandor Goodhart
A Phenomenology of Redemption? - Robert J. Daly
The Girard Effect - William A. Johnsen
René Girard: The Architect of My Spiritual Home - Jozef Niewiadomski
Eucharisto, René Girard: Searching for a Pacifist Theology - Jacques-Jude Lépine
The Way to More Insight and Personal Freedom - Sonja Pos
Girard, Buddhism, and the Psychology of Desire - Eugene Webb
Magister Lucis: In the Light of René Girard - James G. Williams
Breakout from the Belly of the Beast - Robert Hamerton-Kelly
On Paper and in Person, Gil Bailie
Drawn into Conversion: How Mimetic Theory Changed My Way of Being a Christian Theologian - Wolfgang Palaver
For René Girard: In Appreciation - Richard J. Golsan
Dispatch from the Girardian Boundary - Charles Mabee
Things Still Hidden ... - Anthony Bartlett
The Mimeticist Turn: Lessons from Early Girard - Chris Allen Carter
Sacrifice and Sexual Difference: Insights and Challenges in the Work of René Girard - Martha Reineke
"The Key of Knowledge" : A Brief and Entirely Insufficient Account of a Discovery - Giuseppe Fornari
Mimetic Theory and Christian Theology in the Twenty-first Century - Michael E. Hardin
René Girard's Hermeneutic: Discovery and Pedagogy - Tyler Graham
About the Editors and Contributors
