Towards Reconciliation (Understanding Violence and the sacred after René Girard)

A compelling analysis of the connection between violence and the sacred, using René Girard's mimetic theory to point the way towards Christian reconciliation.

Why do humans sacralise the causes for which they fight? Who will decipher for us the enigma of 'sacred violence'?

Paul Gifford 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.

René 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 'sacrificial' 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 autogenerated apocalypses of human violence in the world of tomorrow.