TOWARDS RECONCILIATION Understanding Violence and the Sacred after René Girard de Paul Gifford
Why do humans sacralise the causes for which they ght? Who will decipher for us the enigma of ‘sacred violence’? Paul Gi ord shows that the culture theorist and fundamental anthropologist René Girard has in fact decoded the obscurely ‘foundational’ complicity between violence and the sacred, showing why it is everybody’s problem and the Problem of Everybody.
Why do humans sacralise the causes for which they ght? Who will decipher for us the enigma of ‘sacred violence’? Paul Gi ord shows that the culture theorist and fundamental anthropologist René Girard has in fact decoded the obscurely ‘foundational’ complicity between violence and the sacred, showing why it is everybody’s problem and the Problem of Everybody.
Girard’s mimetic theory, especially his neglected writings on biblical texts, can be read as an anthropological argument continuous with Darwin, shedding formidable new light to a vast array of dark and knotted things: from the functioning of the world’s oldest temple to today’s terrorist violence, from the Cross of Christ to the Good Friday Agreement. . . Such insights illuminate superbly (‘from below’) the ways of creation, revelation, redemption – which is to say, ultimately, the Christian enterprise and vocation of Reconciliation.
Here is a novel and exciting resource for scanning the hidden ‘sacri cial’ logic that still secretly shapes cultural, social, and political life today. Girard puts us ahead of the game in the key dialogues required if we are to avoid auto-generated apocalypses of human violence in the world of tomorrow.
Paul Gifford is Buchanan Professor of French (emeritus) and Director of the Institute of Cultural Identity Studies, at the University of St Andrews. He has also taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Ulster, Western Ontario and Stanford Ca. He knew and worked with Rene Girard: as Invited Scholar at Stanford University (2007), and as elected Visiting Research Fellow of the Girardian Foundation Imitatio (2009-12).