Discovering Girard

by Michael Kirwan (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $15.55

  Really wonderful; an elegantly written initiation into the mimetic theory. I am lucky to have interpreters who understand what I want to say and who can write so well. -Rene Girard The work of Rene Girard is hugely influential in literature and cultural studies. But it is in understanding the relationship between religion and violence that his theory has created its greatest impact. Girard's understanding of mimetic rivalry and conflict and of scapegoating is seen by many to be the key to a completely new understanding of Christianity. Girard's name evokes curiosity and-often-strong feelings among devotees and skeptics. Discovering Girard is the first book to present Girard's work to a wider audience. It explains and appraises Girard's mimetic theory, shows its impact on theology and other disciplines, and manages to convey the excitement that a discovery of Girard's ideas often generates in readers.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.44

  Rene Girard is a thinker who escapes categorization. Both literary critic and anthropologist, not exactly a theorist nor quite a theologian, he even escapes the ubiquitous distinction between modernism and post-modernism. Perhaps because of this, he is one of the more obscure of the many interlocutors with whom theology has engaged over the last couple of decades. If less well known, however, he is no less important, as the extended treatments of his work by the likes of Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Milbank testify.