Bulletin 77 – August 2023

However economists have defined value, Orléan argues, they have always fallen into the trap of seeing it as an objective property belonging to the goods themselves. In this traditional conception, money is treated as a mere veil obscuring the real workings of the economy—a veil that, as Joseph Schumpeter puts it in a characteristic passage of his History of Economic Analysis quoted by Orléan (17), “must be drawn aside.” For this reason, economics textbooks typically begin by describing market exchange as if it were essentially a form of barter in which one good is traded for another. “Money prices must give way,” Schumpeter continues, “to the exchange ratios between the commodities that are the really important thing ‘behind’ money prices.”

For André Orléan, the search for a true value “behind” the money price is a wild goose chase. Money itself is the “really important thing”: “the relation to commodities is always a monetary relation.” Money is the founding institution of the market economy; the ceaseless quest for money its defining feature. The universe of the market is “governed by a single, overpowering desire—the desire for money, to which all other desires are subordinate.” This fascination with money “is at the heart of every market economy, its primordial and inexhaustible source of energy” (109-11).

Some anglophone COV&R members may remember Orléan’s early article “Money and Mimetic Speculation” from the collective volume Violence and Truth (Stanford, 1988). Since then, he has published a series of influential works on money in France. The Empire of Value is a revised and enlarged translation of L’Empire de la valeur, which first came out in 2011 and won the Paul Ricoeur Prize. The English edition includes two bonus chapters that lay out the clearest and most convincing analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis that we have ever seen. With a new crisis visible on the horizon, The Empire of Value is a timely book to read now. But it is also timeless, a book for all seasons, for it uses mimetic theory to construct a framework of analysis valid for periods of stability and crisis alike. Although written mainly for economists, the book is accessible enough to repay careful study by laypersons.

Most readers will agree that Orléan’s emphasis on the desire for money accurately reflects the world we live in. It is surely a more realistic point of departure for understanding the market than the idea of a barter economy with money added as an afterthought to oil the wheels of exchange. As a number of authors have shown, from Marcel Mauss in The Gift to Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics, premonetary economies are based primarily on gift exchange.

The type of barter posited by economists, where isolated individuals meet their needs by trading useful goods back and forth, was for most of human history the exception rather than the rule. Far from facilitating transactions in which people already engage spontaneously, money institutes a radically new form of exchange; it severs the bonds of solidarity that traditionally unite the members of a group, thereby creating the isolated individual agents whose existence is the premise of economic theory. Orléan calls this state of affairs market isolation.

In the state of market isolation, individuals are cut off not only from each other, but from the means of subsistence. As a result, they must depend on others to survive, and yet they cannot directly coordinate their actions with one another. In this strange situation, relations among people are ostensibly mediated by the circulation of things. The commodities that folks buy and sell occupy center stage; they seem to dominate the action, relegating the interaction of the people themselves to the shadows. This is what Marx called commodity fetishism. Orléan (26) quotes Marx’s famous words: “the definite social relation between men themselves” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation among things.”

In neoclassical economics, consumers rank the things offered in the marketplace against each other, evaluating them precisely in terms of their own individual preferences. A consumer’s relative preferences for different baskets of potential goods are specified mathematically in the form of a utility function. Each consumer has their own personal utility function based on the satisfaction or subjective utility that given goods can be expected to provide that particular individual. Preferences are therefore conventionally held to be fixed and “exogenous,” meaning that the formation of those preferences is external to the operation of the market.

“Such preferences are determined by an intimate encounter between the consumer and the things he desires, without any reference to what other people do,” Orléan (38) writes —“neither what they consume, nor what they desire” (these last words appear only in the French text). The relations among people remain in the background, leaving the spotlight on the tête-à-tête between the individual consumer and the object.

Hopeless romantics that they are, mainstream economists “imagine that individual agents know exactly what they want.” The consumers of neoclassical theory are supposed to be the absolute masters of their own desires, “able by force of will alone to select, from the undifferentiated mass of objects,” those worthy of their favor. As Orléan (50-51) observes, this illusory picture of individual autonomy corresponds to what René Girard calls the “romantic lie.”

Quoting from Girard a key passage on desire, Orléan (51) applies it to economists: “When modern theorists envisage man as a being who knows what he wants… they may simply have failed to perceive the domain in which human uncertainty is most extreme. Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being.”

These lines deserve to be quoted in the opening chapter of every introductory textbook on economics. They restore to the foreground the relations among people that the state of market isolation obscures. The fact that individuals do not coordinate with others the actions they take in the marketplace does not mean that those actions are not profoundly influenced by others. Individual consumer preferences seldom arise in isolation; they are constantly subject to the imitation of models. 

But recognizing the mimetic nature of desire is only the first step. Orléan immediately goes on to present the two different regimes of mimetic desire that Girard dubs internal and external mediation. Introducing this distinction proves to be a decisive theoretical move. It allows Orléan to account for both the successes and failures of mainstream economics. This in itself is a signal achievement.

Radical critics often leave the impression that neoclassical theory is utterly out of touch with economic reality. There is ample justification for this criticism, yet it begs the question of why anyone in their right mind would take such a theory seriously. Economic orthodoxy clearly serves an ideological function, but wouldn’t it fail even on those terms if its lack of realism were too obvious? Orléan suggests that the assumptions of neoclassical theory hold up fairly well as long as external mediation prevails. It is when they are confronted with internal mediation that they fall apart.

Orléan shows that the validity of the law of supply and demand depends imperatively on banishing internal mediation. When preferences are fixed and exogenous, consumers have no need to imitate what others do because they already know what objects are worth to them. If the price of a given good rises “too high” compared to the utility consumers expect to derive from it, they will respond by buying less of it, and producers will respond to this drop in demand by lowering their prices again. In this scenario, the falling demand provoked by a rising price constitutes negative feedback that encourages a return to equilibrium.

But the opposite scenario is also possible. What if, rather than sticking doggedly to their own individual utility function, buyers let their preferences be swayed by the behavior of others? “To the extent that the rise in price expresses an increased desire on the part of others to possess a given good, the effect is to intensify the mimetic agent’s own desire” (54). This is what happens with fashionable luxury items, popular new technologies, hot stocks, or fast-appreciating real estate. Here we enter the world of internal mediation, where individuals “no longer know what constitutes worth” and it becomes rational to imitate the desires of others (60).

When a high price is seen as a measure of desirability, the law of supply and demand “no longer holds: the increase in price, rather than causing demand to fall, makes it stronger, which leads to a new rise in price, pushing it still further from its equilibrium level.” The moderating action of negative feedback gives way to the amplifying stimulus of positive feedback, creating a snowball effect. “A perverse dynamic of price and demand is therefore set in motion that, if it is not halted in time, threatens to undermine the entire economic system” (53-54). In the book’s spectacular closing chapters, Orléan demonstrates that precisely this type of dynamic was at work in the subprime crisis, which, though it came on the heels of history’s biggest housing bubble, still caught the majority of economists by surprise.

Mainstream economists are most comfortable with the stability afforded by external mediation. Because they do not understand the way internal mediation favors an escalation to extremes, they perpetually underestimate the threat of a new economic crisis. By contrast, the “strength of the mimetic hypothesis” lies in its ability to accommodate different types of interaction within the same unified framework. “Imitation is a source of stability” when it converges durably on a single model whose legitimacy goes unchallenged. But when “the model loses its position of exteriority,” imitation “produces a contagious dynamic. The mimetic hypothesis therefore makes it possible to analyze both stability and instability, as well as transitions from one state to the other” (60).

When it comes to external mediation, Orléan shows that the neoclassical and Girardian approaches are not incompatible. In external mediation, the model remains aloof from the person doing the imitating, whom we will call, following Girard, the “disciple.” All the imitation is one-way. The disciple imitates the model’s desire, but the model does not imitate the disciple’s desire. Indeed, the disciple has no influence whatsoever on the model. In this sense, there is no interaction between them. Given the lack of interaction, the absence of mutual influence, there is, as Orléan points out, a formal analogy between Girard’s description of external mediation and the neoclassical picture of consumers making decisions in splendid isolation.

This formal analogy exists despite the divergence in underlying assumptions. The consumer of neoclassical theory is nobody’s disciple. Consumers are deemed sovereign, the masters of their own desires. Girardian consumers in the grip of mimetic desire are decidedly not sovereign. In practice, however, a theorist may get away with treating their desires or preferences as if they were fixed and exogenous when those preferences result from imitation of a model that is out of reach rather than from interaction with other consumers in the marketplace.

In these circumstances, there are two possible ways to explain the existence of an exogenous utility function: it is either the consequence of preferences that are naturally stable because they are anchored in a sovereign individual, or else it is the consequence of imitating an external mediator. Orléan is thus able to account for the findings of mainstream economics from his own Girardian perspective. The importance of this is worth underscoring. It means that mimetic theory can encompass the results of mainstream economics within a broader theoretical framework, so that neoclassical consumer behavior is understood as a special case of mimetic behavior encountered in the presence of external mediation.

Who are the external mediators? The Girardian reader may think of prestigious individuals whom throngs of strangers admire from afar: actors, singers, sports stars, billionaires… All these examples are relevant. Orléan devotes much attention to the question of prestige. But he also has something else in mind: not a “who” but a “what.” In the state of market isolation, individual agents treat the values that emerge from their interaction as if they had an independent existence. At the most fundamental level, then, external mediation is something built into the market system itself. 

We can see this most clearly in the model of general equilibrium proposed by the French economist Léon Walras, one of the pioneers of neoclassical economics. In Walras’s model, prices emerge from an auction-style bidding process in which they are progressively adjusted in order to balance supply and demand. Price formation is “wholly external to individuals.” Each participant in the auction operates in total isolation; the “transactions take place without agents ever entering into contact with one another,” Orléan writes (44-45). How is this possible? Thanks to the intervention of an imaginary figure who guides the process from the outside: the auctioneer. Here the “what” of external mediation is significantly embodied in a mythical “who.”

But the role of external mediator is also played by commodities themselves once they are conceived as possessing intrinsic value. Relations among people can then be mediated by things; these act like a “third party” that separates individuals and “dispenses with any need for them to be in direct contact with one another” (59). The neoclassical vision of an encounter between individuals equipped with fixed preferences and objects endowed with utilitarian value is not entirely baseless for Orléan. Rather, he sees it as the transitory result of a particular mimetic regime that emerges when preferences and values have been stabilized.

This regime is more precarious than it seems. Utility and preferences are not objective facts established once and for all, Orléan insists. “They are social constructions that, taken together, have the function of preserving and protecting the state of market isolation by blocking the emergence of mimetic rivalries” (87). Social constructions endure as long as faith in them persists. The best illustration of this is money. The value of money depends on people’s belief in it. This unspoken truth bursts out into the open when a loss of confidence provokes a currency crisis. But when a country’s currency appears strong, people take for granted the value of their money and perceive it as independent of their own interaction.

In the final analysis, money is the most essential external mediator in the market economy. It is what allows for transactions between individuals who are strangers to each other. Everyone desires money because everyone knows that everyone else desires it. The “unanimous desire of market actors for money” is what renders exchange possible (124). Money is the expression of a universal mimetic convergence on a single standard of value that is thereby invested with the “power of the multitude.” Once this power assumes the form of the chosen monetary object, it is “distanced from itself and transfigured.” The value that the collectivity bestows on money now appears to be “a part of its nature” (147).

What about the value of ordinary commodities? If their value is not, as traditional economic theory posits, an objective property of the goods themselves, what is its source? How should it be defined? Orléan’s answer is as simple and straightforward as it is surprising: “The value of a good is measured by the quantity of money that this good makes it possible to acquire, that is, by its price. From this it follows that price and value are, at bottom, one and the same thing” (124).

As anyone not a professional economist will tell you, economic value all comes down to money. This view is hardly romantic. At first blush, it may even sound cynical. But in the context of Orléan’s theory, the opposite is true. For money itself, as we just saw, is a collective creation. It draws its power from us. “Value does not reside in objects,” Orléan concludes. “It is produced by human beings acting in concert with one another” (324). The ultimate source of value is none other than the human community.

Every economist—and everyone who wants to understand why we keep blundering from one financial crisis to another—should read André Orléan’s audacious and ambitious book. The Empire of Value lives up to its promise of rebuilding economic theory on sounder foundations. And it does so through a strikingly original use of René Girard’s mimetic theory.

The editor’s introduction gives a good account of Girard’s ideas, which receive sustained attention in “Sacrifice and the Origin of Law,” Wolfgang Palaver’s clear and compact discussion of the role of sacrifice that we don’t wish to acknowledge in legal institutions and practices.  Johan Van Der Walt’s lengthy and somewhat meandering contribution, “The Gift of Time and the Hour of Sacrifice,” brings Girard into conversation with the anthropologies of Robertson-Smith on ancient religion, of Hubert and Mauss on gift rituals, and of Georges Bataille’s reflections on Eros and potlatch. Carl Schmitt’s political theology is also engaged here—and often elsewhere; he is a convenient straw man, a foil for the left: there are Derridians and Girardians aplenty, but no Schmittians anywhere to be found, no subscribers to the ideas of this former legal functionary of the Third Reich. Van Der Walt concludes with Derrida’s idea of democracy as something that is always to come, “à venir”—we have to give it time (“donner le temps”). His aim is to account for the current resurgence of populist politics, its violent haste and intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, of the complexity, in a word, that political liberalism, on the contrary, allows for. It’s a matter of trust and risk, which for some theologians go by the name of “messianic patience,” as opposed to sweeping and strident guarantees. 

 Critical scrutiny of liberal democracy is in turn undertaken by Richard Mailey, who, in “Sacrificial Liberalism,” stages a virtual debate between John Rawls and Carl Schmitt. His subtitle, “The Politics of Zeal and its Selective Denial in Rawl’s Political Liberalism” pretty much summarizes his argument. Mailey’s point is to de-differentiate them, a classic deconstructive operation. Where Schmitt’s political theology, founded upon the friend/enemy dyad, is openly sacrificial, as his commentators never fail to point out, Rawls’s criterion of public “reasonableness” is indicted as a “‘God’ concept,” a species of “secular fundamentalism” (159). This is a criticism bolstered by recourse to Chantal Mouffe, who has warned us away from hegemonic proclivities of democratic liberalism. “Zeal” as defined by Rawls herein involves “a relentless struggle to win the world for the whole truth” (153). Girardian epistemology, which makes just such a claim “since the foundation of the world,” is not invited to this debate, but readers can find a vigorous exposition of it in Paul Dumouchel‘s Barren Sacrifice, which is helpfully consulted in a  few other essays. 

Girard does not figure either in Jeffrey A. Ellsworth’s essay, “The Sacrifice of Law’s Madness,” which examines the unapologetic lawlessness of the Bundy family’s armed resistance to the Bureau of Land Management in 2014. Ellsworth skewers its “crippled epistemology” (172), which also fuels the motivations of the Oklahoma City bomber. Ellsworth rightly deplores the “widespread legal ignorance in the US,” and in turn calls for more public legal education. By “madness” is meant the redemptive urgency of terrorism, a “counter narrative to dominant legal reality” (183). Of course, there is no need of mimetic theory to establish such a difference as that in a culture beset by a veritable plague of gun violence throughout. 

In “(Misguided) Self-transcendance and the Imagination of Sacrifice,” Arthur Cools relies principally on the thematics spelled out in Moshe Halbertals in On Sacrifice (2012), while focusing on some essays of Maurice Blanchot that bring writing and revolution into close association—though not obviously to the benefit of the public weal judging by Cools’s concluding statement: “The possibility Blanchot is pointing at is that of a sacrifice which is continuously transgressive and excessive; sacrifice made of rejecting what is given, breaking laws, crossing over limits, not following the rules at [sic] the point of becoming meaningless, of losing everything, of disappearing but always captivating, singular and recursive” (56). That might strike readers as a recipe for anarchy as favored by the early surrealists and more recently by the paving stone throwing of Parisian soixante-huitards. It could also bring to mind the undifferentiating chaos incited by Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae, which Girard scrutinizes in Violence and the Sacred. But Cools, like all the other contributors, does not look to literary masterpieces to illustrate or explain his argumentation; instead he calls upon Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus, celebrating “the boundless impulse of desire” (55). For what it’s worth, Girard’s reading of Euripides, indeed his entire oeuvre, is a properly anthropological critique of just such an “impulse” as that. But perhaps I am misreading the author, for elsewhere he aligns with Halbertals’s claims against “misguided transcendence,” concerning “the role of imagination not only as  a support for representing goals and overestimating values, but much more as the negative power which rejects God and world as such and which reveals its boundless and devastating play in the void that results from this rejection” (56). That strikes me as more in line with Girard’s thinking, especially his very high estimation of literary masterpieces, as in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, that expose our fatuous delusions about desire. Culture, like nature, abhors a vacuum: what fills this “void” is violence, which is resisted by still more violence.  Yeats’s image of a “widening gyre” in “The Second Coming” daily takes on real historical pertinence.

In “Law, Authority, and the Sovereign Exception: The (Im)possibility of Political Agency,” Richard Hajarizadeh undertakes to compare and contrast Derrida’s “Force of Law” with Jacques Rancière’s Disagreement Politics and Philosophy, and this with a heavy assist from Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Walter Benjamin, in order to conclude upon “law’s self de(con)struction” (106).  In sum, “the law is its own negation” (109). This conclusion is not surprising, as it follows a Derridean model to examine concepts not in order to clearly differentiate them from their opposites, but instead to expose their internal contradictions, their difference from themselves, their parasitical relation to what they oppose. No examples, historical or textual, are adduced to illustrate this argument, so perhaps we don’t have to worry about what to do about it.

In “A We not Modeled on the I: The Law of Law,” Samuel  A. Kimball also recruits Derrida to expose, also contra  Schmitt, the self-contradictions embedded in legal foundations, as “Auto-Affective Self-Illusion” (68),  though he confuses the explicitly divine sanction for violence in our Declaration of Independence with the coolly temperate and technical language of our Constitution. On the other hand, he makes good use of Girard’s anti-sacrificial critique in his reading of the role of Poseidon in the Odyssey, which he links with the Pauline paradox in “the imperative to love the one who is other (Rom.13:7).” For Kimball, “This imperative commands all other imperatives. Like the law of law, which is therefore law without law, the imperative of all imperatives is without imperative” (75).  No recourse to biblical scholarship or mainstream theology is engaged here, but Girard’s biblical anthropology would help to fill out this picture.

In “Towards a Sacrificial Aneconomy? Georges Bataille and the Aporia of Sacrifice,” Marie Chabbert consult’s Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of  Bataille’s sinister flirtation with sacrificial violence, a disarming wedding of Eros with Thanatos, which is etherealized after WW II. As a matter of fact not cited here, a romance with nonsense, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, issued from the horrific violence of WW I, as French thinkers experienced widespread disillusionment with Western institutions and the shibboleths of bourgeois humanism. The Holocaust, she notes, changed the way to think about all this; rather than a black hole in history, it stands as an end point, the dark mirror of long-term institutional practices coming home to roost. This is Jean-Luc Nancy’s take on it, as available in the words one of his commentators, whom she quotes as follows: “The limit of the thought of sacrifice, its historical limit… is the experience of the death camps, which is perhaps the ultimate horizon of the whole of the modern thinking of sacrifice” (30). Chabbert follows both Blanchot and Nancy in advising us to step away from the worst of Bataille’s lucubrations, while aligning with Derrida’s reading of Bataille. The target here, of course, is metaphysical closure, with aporia as their end point, though it may strike readers as the counsel of despair: “Derrida’s deconstructive strategy emphasizes and maintains the aporetic structure identified in supposedly absolute concepts and unified theories” (38). No wonder that Girard does not appear in these pages (nor anywhere in Derrida’s own writings), for his mimetic hypothesis does accumulate to a unified theory, which repels as many thinkers as it attracts. Chabbert would certainly be among the former. When she embarks on political implications, introducing John Milbank and Jean-Luc Marion into the discussion, we are invited to consider “the imperfection of politics” (40), along with “an uncontaminable openness to change” (40), a phrase lifted from yet another scholar. This harmonizes with van der Walt’s conception, along, I suspect, with most reasonable people, though not in so many words, and so many, many dense formulations, tongue-twisting neologisms, and cumbersome bibliographies. (This kind of writing in several of these essays makes for unnecessarily difficult reading, spawned by acolytes of “French Theory” whose sell-by date should have expired by now.) Democratic institutions and constitutions are by definition dedicated to self-critical renewal, not unlike biblical inspiration. Not unlike Pascal’s wager for faith in eternal salvation, democracy in a desacralized, disenchanted world comes down to a “beau risque à courir.” It’s not a sure bet in our fraught political climate, marked as it is by neofascist clamor, that informs the concerns of a number of these essayists. 

Brian W. Nail’s “Homo Sacrificus: Sacrificial Economization and Neoliberal Subjectivity” enlists the rival and complementary anthropologies of Girard and Walter Burkert, whose Homo Necans added yet another modifier to our species’ definition. They are taken on board here “to demystify the violence inherent to the logic of neoliberalism” (79); by this he means a competition-based theory of society that is dominated by “the ideological and institutional symbiosis between states and the industry of global finance” (80) that functions to the benefit of corporate shareholders and that, in his view, has colonized all domains of human subjectivity. The result is “wasted lives,” victims of the “neoliberal security state”; the culprits are, Nail quoting Kimball here, “stratified social institutions that funnel resources up a narrow hierarchy of privilege and power” (88). In the global empire of finance capitalism, depersonalized alibis for agency—terms of trade, market demands, competitive pressures, productivity, efficiency—remove the human factor in the harvests of precarity, when everything is weighed in terms of creditor/debtor relations. A surplus population of “flawed consumers may be regarded as collateral damage of economic  progress” (81) due to what Harvey Cox, quoted herein, calls a “market theology” (88). And an imperial corporatocracy “mystifies its own sacrificial logic through rhetorical appeals to the common project of economic nationalism” (94).

Girard himself has concisely pilloried our frantic consumerism in Battling to the End, and Nail’s account can be said to fill out that critical view with multiple references to economic theorists, the bestselling Thomas Picketty, Michael Lewis, and Karl Polanyi among them. Where archaic cultures sacralized violence, socioeconomic stratification and consequent immiseration wrought by capitalism are naturalized, which comes to the same pseudo-foundational thinking. Nail’s solution calls for “social and political cooperation” that is “not exclusively based upon  ideological commonality but rather ontobiological mutuality” (97), the goal being “a renewal of the demos and a restoration of communal forms of the social good that are insulated from  the corrosive influence of financiarization” (98.) This, after having elaborately argued that nothing is insulated from the systemic, tentacular reach of the corporatocracy. His final remarks return us to “the primordial figure of homo sacrificus (98) with Derrida’s meditation of the Akedah (Van Der Walt goes there too) in The Gift of Death, where he reflects on the possible/impossible range of responsibility: “I put to death, I betray, and lie, I don’t need to raise my knife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all of the Mount Moriahs of the world, I am doing that, raising my knife over what I love and must love, over the other, to this or than other to whom I owe an absolute fidelity, incommensurably” (99). I find that these words resonate with the elder Zosima’s profession of faith in Brothers Karamazov: “Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” As we reasonably expect, a truism comes to light: Great minds—Girard, Derrida, Dostoyevsky, for example—think alike.

In the first section, about “Science, Emotions, and Re-enchantment,” Kauffman looks at the “re-enchantment of humanity.” He posits, via Max Weber, that the dis-enchantment of humanity began with Isaac Newton and continues into the present. Kauffman says from the beginning of his chapter, “I am advancing the hypothesis that in the biosphere we do not know and we cannot know what will happen, that is, the future cannot be pre-determined” (20). In good, scientific fashion, he then goes on to offer three corollaries that follow from the assumption: (a) the world in which humanity lives is full of “creative” possibilities; (b) “the creative emergence of something new establishes something with its own ontology” (this something cannot be reduced to physics nor be determined by the laws of physics); and (c) “our minds can make a difference to what happens in the world” (20).

Kauffman’s approach throws any given situation of conflict at the mercy of all the players involved. Each of the writers then follows with their own understanding of the process of reconciliation, but a main theme that arises is that, at its foundation, reconciliation is bound to the mercy of listening, speaking, and allowing the eventual outcome to emerge—whatever that outcome might be.

The book leans heavily on the spiritual aspect of reconciliation, and, at first, I had the question, What does “spirituality” mean? For the modern public, and for me, the term is a loaded one and fraught with pitfalls. Each of the writers, in turn, however, treats this term. In the end I am left with the understanding that “spirituality” is closely akin to inspiration—in fact, Vern states that spirituality could be “thought of as that which might animate reconciliation just like spirit-breath brought adam to life…” (2, emphasis mine, to show Vern’s coupling of the ideas of spirit and anima/breath in both his introduction and his later chapter). He does finish the paragraph with the caveat that humanity needs to discover what that inspiration might be.

Later, in part two, concerned with “The Emergence of the Ethical,” Sandor Goodhart shows more plainly, with his interpretation of the Genesis story of the beginning of the world, that the divine work spoken of there refers not to a finished one, but to a work in continual progress—a work in which humanity has a part to play. From a philosophical point of view, it seems this view of each having something to contribute could be helpful in the process of reconciliation.

Nadia Delicata’s contribution in this section addresses the modern age with its emerging possibilities. Building upon the title of Kauffman’s work, Reinventing the Sacred, Delicata, professor of moral theology at the University of Malta, does an excellent treatment of natural law throughout Western, Greco-Roman, and “Christianized” (her term) culture. She also remarks on Girard’s work and its Christian meta-narrative (153) as she addresses the modern “model of becoming.” Delicata then brings the reader into the digital age and challenges readers to deal with the timely question of Artificial Intelligence as she brings Homo techologicus to this conversation. She encourages the reader to be open to the digital age to allow a myriad of possibilities to emerge.

A third section addresses “Religion, Emergence, and Well-being.” Gloria points toward different points in history where the “new” has emerged, from the Protestant Reformation to Puritanism/Pietism, to the Great Awakenings and into the rigidity of groups like Fundamentalist Christianity. She points out that each of the movements started from the bottom. Each movement involved a pushing against expected norms and offered no known conclusion, but emerged from the old into something new.

In one of the most intriguing chapters, Barbod Salimi, argues quite persuasively for a performative approach to understanding the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), calling adherents to be faithful to the importance of reconciliation attested to in their sacred texts. 

Though one may have tired of hearing the “Western” or “Christian” perspective in news, culture, and in reconciliation, one finds in reading this book many questions and struggles with both sides of that challenge. On the one hand, the volume has those Western and Christian perspectives, but there are also the Eastern concerns reiterated by Judaism and Islam. On the other hand, the West has to come to grips with the challenges that it, in many ways is culturally formed within the milieu of, as Delicata puts it, a “christianized” culture. What does that mean?

That reality can be both blessing and curse. This book brings some of those challenges and asks the reader to lay aside biases where possible and allow a new, creative process to lead the way.

A fourth section groups five articles under the heading “Consciousness, Relationships, Justice, and Peace.” All sixteen contributions to this volume provide poignant insights and much to think about, but because of time and the length of this review all could not be included here. The greatest take-away from the work is that, like life itself, reconciliation is a process—one that one must submit to in order to be changed. That process often takes time, and it means that change is inevitable for all parties involved. Reconciliation leads to endless possibilities that cannot be imagined by those who embark on its adventure. 

Much like Girard’s work, this book leaves the reader with a healthy bit of ambiguity that leads to more questions, and infinite possibilities to move forward in the reconciliation process. A companion book edited by the couple, entitled, Transforming, follows this one. If it is as insightful as this volume, there is much to which one might look forward.