Sandor Goodhart

Sandor Goodhart is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Classics at Purdue University. He has published numerious articles in journals such as Diacrit...

James G. Williams

James G. Williams is the author of The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred and editor of The Girard Reader.

Jørgen Jørgensen

Jørgen Jørgensen edited a collection of essays on Girard entitled Syndens sold.

Tom Ryba

Tom Ryba is Notre Dame Theologian-in-Residence at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center at Purdue University.

For René Girard
Essays in Friendship and in Truth

Sandor Goodhart

James G. Williams

Jørgen Jørgensen

Tom Ryba

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:
- 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

ALSO OF INTEREST: Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre by René Girard

Violence, Mimesis, and Culture Series