Bulletin 81 – August 2024

After sharing that experience, UnRival board member and Artisans of Peace alum Joel Aguilar and I decided to run an experiment—to take a risk. We wanted to test the value of gathering peacebuilders from diverse backgrounds, but similar faith traditions. Whose languages of faith and spiritual practice, so often sources of rivalry, might also help form a nonrivalrous community. This Fall, we are opening such a space in a new cohort of Artisans of Peace, designed for American Christian leaders who feel their own faith traditions contributing more towards rivalry and violence than to peace—and who want to change that.

Adapting Artisans of Peace for American Christian Leaders

We chose to focus on US-based Christian leaders in this cohort because Christianity, which has always been a dominant force in US culture and politics, is at a crossroads. With the noted rise of White Christian Nationalism as a major political force, pastors, teachers, and spiritual leaders face polarization in their communities and are drawn into increasingly rivalrous situations. While still committed to their faith, they are reevaluating their religion’s roles and forms in their communities.

As we’ve listened to potential candidates for this cohort, we’ve heard them describe their struggles as:

• The struggle to speak truth to power while also “loving their enemies”
• The struggle to serve the poor and the powerful with equal integrity, dehumanizing no one
• The sense that their own privilege and cultural dominance impedes acting out their faith
• Persistent fear of rejection or expulsion from jobs or communities because of their concerns for peace, justice, and the marginalized
• A general sense of dissonance between the values and actions of Christian institutions

Mostly, we hear a craving for a different kind of community: a place to be heard, to heal, and to confront the scandal of violent theology—both in our nation and in ourselves. A desire for what author Aimee Byrd calls “unpretentious companionship” between those tending their communities’ spiritual wellbeing amidst a storm of competing agendas.

This program is designed to refresh the hearts of US-based Christian leaders asking these sorts of questions, for whom the language of faith is essential but the path forward is unclear. They are buffeted by polarization but motivated by nonviolent theology and discipleship.

Our goal, in this specially adapted cohort, is to help pastors, artists, academics, and other Christian community leaders become “more human.” To open up space where they can wade into complexity. This will be a co-created space of safety and support where we practice trusting that, as theologian Willie James Jennings says, “The new always waits on the other side of risk.”

The Need for Nonrivalrous Space

Lutheran pastor and journalist Angela Denker writes, “simple narratives tend to sell better.” This can be even more true in religious environments, where spiritual leaders are often called on not to help people of faith grow and mature, but to provide reassurances of personal goodness and identity.

The spiritual leader is saddled with a role that is at once “managerial and messianic,” Aimee Byrd writes, expected to step into others’ hurts and messy lives with all the aplomb of a seasoned project manager, equipped with all the latest knowledge and content that will solve everybody’s problems. Spiritual leaders, constantly faced with their congregations’ high expectations of personal and political reassurance, find themselves friendless, lonely—even dehumanized. Certainly under-equipped for peacebuilding.

Our friend Patty Prasado-Rao echoed the need among pastors and spiritual leaders for nonrivalrous spaces like those we provide in Artisans of Peace: “It’s like everything is against us making those nuanced connections,” she told us. “It no longer feels like ‘the answers’ are answering anything. [These leaders] know that those under them will be shaken to learn that they don’t feel strong or confident… [But] if there is even such a thing as a theological basis for peace work, where is it? Where is the theology, where is the base? Where are the places for [them] to share their own questions, their own fears, their own difficulties?”

We believe Artisans of Peace provides the blueprint for such a space, one that can be adapted to provide spiritual leaders with the time and attention to watch and strengthen their webs of relationship. Here’s an idea of what to expect from this cohort:

1. A Space of Silence and Attention. Spiritual leadership, Byrd writes, quoting author Eugene Peterson, “is ‘the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation.’ This requires a slowing down, a listening, a looking, contemplation, prayer, doing what looks like nothing.” Among those we’ve spoken to about Artisans of Peace, many crave spaces where they can be silent together, building trust and community through that willingness to sit in silence rather than “fix” each other in “project manager mode.” Artisans of Peace assumes that need for silence, drawing on the wisdom of many religious traditions. It is readily adaptable to the specific rhythms of prayer and contemplation that many spiritual leaders find themselves lacking right now.
2. A Space of Encounter and Belonging. Byrd continues that the vocation of spiritual leadership demands “[R]everence for people’s secrets, embracing the holiness of encounter, and curiosity and imagination to see the Spirit working at this moment. It is a refusal to accept the faces that are being presented—both the virtue and the vices that mask our untold stories—and get a glimpse of the work that God is inviting us into together.” In Artisans of Peace, we allow the masks of what we’ve accomplished to slip, revealing who we are in a space of mutual learning. Spiritual leaders also need space to shed these masks together, and this is especially true for peace-minded Christian leaders who face such aggressive expectations about their own vocations.
3. A Space of Refreshment and Celebration. Each of us has dozens of occasions every day to say what we’re against. Artisans of Peace is a space for celebrating what we’re for: what we desire, who taught us to desire it, and what sustains our hope that the world really can change for the better. Almost all the leaders we’ve spoken with also share faith in a spiritual force that is slowly, persistently making all things new. Spiritual leaders need spaces where we can use that language, where they can laugh and cry about the beauty they still find in their religious traditions, despite rivalistic uses of that language. Spirituality doesn’t need to be serious and heavy all the time; at its best, it is a source of deep joy, levity, and sustenance.
4. The Creative Surprises of Grace. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” This cohort takes that spiritual instruction to heart, but also believes in the very concrete, earthy wisdom of it: we’re better together. Our differences breed creativity and affirmation. Where our hearts and attention are trained towards each other, new possibilities show up in surprising, transformative ways.

Everyone–even the humblest of peacebuilders and spiritual leaders–need nonrivalrous spaces and practices to sustain them down the uncertain road ahead. If this sounds like you or someone you know, please get in touch. We’re eager to hear from you.

In the following I will explain why I think that from Girard’s perspective it is neither possible nor desirable to return to Constantine. I show in what sense a Constantinian version of Christianity would significantly deviate from Girard’s understanding of it, would also fall behind the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, and would even deviate from a main dimension of the post-axial religions.

With the term Constantinianism I do not address the personal faith of the Roman emperor but the amalgamation of church and political power that is usually connected with his name. With Constantine’s deathbed conversion, Christianity no longer remained a religion of a small minority in the Roman Empire but began to become its dominant religion. During Christian history, this Constantinian and imperial legacy shaped the relation between church and political power in various forms. John H. Yoder rightly observed, in an insightful essay, that not only Catholicism embodied this dangerous alignment of the church with political power; later movements that fought against it were not able to overcome it but led to versions of it that were even more problematic (Yoder, pp. 135-147). As an example, he mentions those Protestant churches that fought against the Constantinian Catholicism but resulted in an even closer alignment with a particular nation state.

To understand the dangers coming along with a Constantinian interpretation of Christianity, we can turn to the political theology of the infamous German law scholar Carl Schmitt, who endorsed a Constantinian church that seeks to govern and dominate worldly affairs. In his book Roman Catholicism and Political Form, he understands the Roman Catholic Church as a “world-historical form of power” (Schmitt, p. 21). He neither puts the longing for eternal goods first nor does he understand how central servanthood and the cross are to avoiding mimetic rivalries in the way Jesus showed us to do. A hugely different Christ characterizes Schmitt’s understanding of the Church when he states that “it represents Christ reigning, ruling and conquering” (Schmitt, p. 31). Schmitt’s book appeared more than one hundred years ago and might be seen as a work that has nothing to say to our current world. Schmitt, however, is today widely read all over the world. His work is eagerly consulted in China and Russia and has also influenced those ideologues who call for a new Christian nationalism or support the revival of a Catholic integralism (Lilla).

A careful reading of Girard’s oeuvre shows his critique of a Constantinian view of Christianity. There is a passage in his book The Scapegoat that describes how the Constantinian legacy turned the religion that revealed the persecutory dimension of early religion into a religious system with its own type of persecution:

Beginning with Constantine, Christianity triumphed at the level of the state and soon began to cloak with its authority persecutions similar to those in which the early Christians were victims. Like so many subsequent religions, ideological, and political enterprises, Christianity suffered persecution while it was weak and became the persecutor as soon as it gained strength. (Scapegoat, p. 204, translation corrected)

Close to what Yoder has observed in his essay, Girard also remarked in a radio interview with David Cayley that criticism of Constantinianism is, however, not protected from being contagiously infected by the very violence that it wants to overcome:

Christianity first becomes an establishment under Constantine. You denounce it. Then there’s the Inquisition, followed by the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Reformation says, we are going to be that perfect church that the Catholics were not able to be. But after a few centuries, they become the same. And it doesn’t stop there. They will be criticized, too. And then they all survive together. They become a horrible big mess. But the spirit of critique is always more powerful than the institution. And what we must try to purify is that critique. Critique always embodies an element of the same violence it is criticizing. It’s always in the same circle of violence. (Cayley/Girard, p. 32)

What Girard addresses in this warning is the real temptation of the Antichrist that means to follow Christ but only leads to a scapegoating of scapegoaters or to “a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree” (I See Satan, p. 158).

In an interview from the late 1980s, Girard expressed his distance from Constantinian concepts by referring to the Biblical principle “of give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what us God’s” and to the “idea that Satan is the prince of this world,” therefore claiming that the “absolute separation between religion and the state is essential” and that it “is clearly affirmed in the Gospel” (Dormoy/Girard, p. 56).

Girard deals with the Constantinian temptation even more broadly in the chapter “The Pope and the Emperor” in his last book Battling to the End. He focuses on the history of the papacy and shows how it slowly was able to detach itself from political power and won through this its moral authority. He sees a culmination of this in Pope John Paul II’s repentance by confessing the sins of the Church in the year 2000:

When I say that the papacy won, I am thinking immediately of this repentance, by which the papacy triumphed over itself and acquired worldwide significance. Before our eyes, it succeeded in expelling all imperial ideas, at the very point when its temporal power disappeared. (Battling, p. 200)

In this chapter of Battling to the End, Girard remarks that the Byzantine Empire did not know this separation from worldly power that has increasingly characterized Western Christianity (Battling, p. 200-201, 209). This insight helps us to understand the problematic position of the Russian Orthodox Church of today that legitimizes Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine as a “holy war.”

Girard praises in this chapter also Pope Benedict’s opposition to any “compulsion” in religion (Battling, p. 209) and underlines by this the endorsement of religious freedom by the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church:

If Vatican II did one essential thing, it was to assert religious freedom, for if there is one single thing that Christianity cannot violate, it is the freedom to reject Revelation. (Battling, p. 199)

Girard reads the Biblical revelation—especially the teachings of Jesus—in the same way as the fathers of the Second Vatican Council who understood that it excludes compulsion in religion. The most decisive step of the Catholic Church in our modern world was indeed its overcoming of Constantinianism in the Second Vatican Council. The declaration on religious freedom Dignitatis humanae, in which coercion in matters of religion is clearly rejected, is one of the most important documents of the Council. According to this document, religious freedom finds its justification in the Biblical revelation. Dignitatis humanae openly declares that the Church must reject all means that “are incompatible with the spirit of the Gospel” (No. 14). The example of Jesus Christ—his nonviolence, patience, and rejection of force—must also become the way of the Church: “Christ is at once our Master and our Lord and also meek and humble of heart. In attracting and inviting His disciples He used patience. […] He refused to be a political messiah, ruling by force. […] He acknowledged the power of government and its rights, when He commanded that tribute be given to Caesar: but He gave clear warning that the higher rights of God are to be kept inviolate: ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ (Matt. 22:21)” (No. 11). This biblical turn of the Council has become the starting point of the Catholic social ethics as Pope John Paul II later developed it. This pope brought the legacy of the Council to its blossoming. He was really the first non-Constantinian or post-Constantinian pope, a fact that Girard highlighted by praising the Pope’s repentance in 2000.

A return to a Constantinian understanding of Christianity goes, however, even beyond Catholicism because it challenges a key dimension of all postaxial religions that are characterized by their awareness of a transcendence that relativizes all worldly power and allows for the first time in human history a distinction between politics and religion. Unfortunately, the postaxial religions remain tempted to fall behind this religious achievement, as history shows. And this temptation is still with us if we think of the Hindutva movement in India that tries to create a Hindu state, of attempts in certain traditions of Islam to create a caliphate or an Islamic state, or of today’s Russian Orthodox Church, and of the rising Christian nationalism in the US and other countries. Whatever one thinks of Emperor Constantine’s personal faith, this brief essay should convince its readers that we should not return to a Constantinian understanding of Christianity.

My critique of Constantinianism, however, does not mean to opt for an apolitical Christianity. In this regard I side with Peter Thiel, at least to a certain degree. His statement is provoking because by opposing Constantine to Mother Theresa he contrasts an imperial type of church with a saintly person that presents an apolitical understanding of the church. I remember that as a student we argued with the church hierarchy at that time who always preferred Mother Theresa over our political activities following liberation theology or people like Oscar Romero. My knowledge about Mother Theresa is not enough to judge if she really was apolitical. My worries with Thiel’s statement stem from the fact that there are many different viable solutions for a political church between these two extreme poles. This essay tried to emphasize the dangers that a return to Constantine would bring with it.

Thiel’s statement asks for a positive response regarding a political type of church and its proper relationship to the state. Such a response also needs to show what a Christian understanding of the katechon might look like today. This will require another essay that I hopefully can draft soon. For a quick response I often refer to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the relationship between the katechon and the church, in which he significantly differed from Carl Schmitt’s Constantinian endorsement of the katechon (Palaver, pp. 20-21). Schmitt viewed the katechon as a Christian concept of order by overlooking the fact that it not only restrains the Antichrist but also postpones the second coming of Christi. Bonhoeffer wrote that the katechon is neither identical with God nor without sin but is sometimes necessary to preserve the world from destruction. The church cooperates with the katechon without neglecting its primary task to embody “the miracle of a new awakening of faith” that provides orientation for the katechon, too. A proper unfolding of this difference will hopefully follow soon in one of the next issues of the Bulletin.

References

Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

________. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001.

________. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Translated by Mary Baker Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2010.

Girard, René, and David Cayley. The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio Interviews from March 5–9, 2001. Toronto, 2001.

Girard, René, and Nadine Dormoy. The World of René Girard: Interviews. Translated by William A. Johnsen Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2024.

Gruenler, Curtis. “Be Not Conformed.” The Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion, no. 78 (December 2023).

Lilla, Mark. “The Tower and the Sewer.” The New York Review of Books 71, no. 11 (2024): 14-18.

Palaver, Wolfgang. “Sacrifice and the Origin of Law.” In Law’s Sacrifice: Approaching the Problem of Sacrifice in Law, Literature, and Philosophy, edited by Brian W. Nail and Jeffrey A. Ellsworth, 12-22. London: Routledge, 2019.

Schmitt, Carl. Roman Catholicism and Political Form. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Second Vatican Council. “Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae: On the Right of the Person and of Communities to Social and Civil Freedom in Matters Religious.”  1965.

Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

How to assess this in Girardian terms? Reflecting on Islamist violence in Battling to the End, Girard saw the “escalation to extremes” enter a new phase. But as reactions to the double-edged Gaza drama waver on which side to back and whether the West’s claim that Israel is fighting for democratic values can stand, a Girardian analysis will no doubt have to consider Putin’s project and its backing by the BRICS associates. On the other hand, the shifting moral anger also holds a prophetic, say Girardian, inspiration about the democratic values Israel and its supporters are alleged to defend against what is unfolding. The weight is tilting to a division that has so far hardly been noted. Where Putin and the Islamists both refute the “absolute priority of the individual,” on which democracy boasts itself to rest, and even dub it the root of a recurrent fascism, the question arises if this does not somehow echo a basic Girardian concern, making his notion of “interdividuality” score well in various circles, whether or not they forswear violence.

In this context, we may consider the extremes to which Putin has been going in his “anti-polonization” fight. After showing pitiless brutality in Chechnya and Georgia, and while preparing to attack Ukraine’s Crimea, Putin is strongly believed by many to have dared a most hideous offense. This happened in April 2010, against the Poland that once hosted the military counterpart of NATO in the Warsaw pact, which was home to the Pope who made the Soviet empire unstitch, and whose President Lech Kaczynski was siding with Georgia’s liberals. Having reluctantly agreed to erect a monument for the thousands of Polish WW II officers executed in 1940 at Katyn under Stalin, and to join Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk for the inauguration of this memorial, he insisted that President Kaczynski—opponent of Tusk’s party—shouldn’t visit that place until the next day. The Polish presidential Tupolev-jet had been in a Moscow “service” for six months and had been returned just for this flight. Before Pres. Kaczynski and nearly one hundred officials took off, the special air control equipment that was installed on Smolensk airfield for the Putin and Tusk flights was secretly removed. When an unexplained mist suddenly covered the airfield and faulty orders from the control tower made the pilot fatally lower his course, a crash-with-explosion followed. Putin adamantly claimed the right to investigate the event and all evidence was moved to Moscow; flight boxes were meddled with, the victims’ remains were fumbled, and when finally the coffins were released, Polish relatives were told not to open them. As this order was ignored, the scam was discovered, including traces of explosives that are held to have blown up the plane in the air before touching the trees. Nonetheless, Tusk was persuaded to let the issue rest, so as not to endanger EU-Russian relations, and notably the North Stream energy project. After being voted out and indicted of this negligence and other issues, of which he was oddly acquitted, Tusk was offered the Brussels EU presidency. To Putin this signaled that he could safely go ahead in his adventures, such as the 2014 invasion of Crimea, and test the West’s coherence. 

We perceive four dissimilar sacrificial excesses that Girard’s theory may assimilate. The crashing of a President’s plane for siding with the opponent is truly sacrificial; but so is letting this go unchallenged for material gain. And in the Gaza-controversy we see collateral damage being taken for granted as listlessly as the brutal murder of innocent civilians to allegedly compensate for ongoing oppression. With Patriarchs and Ayatollahs approving of such atrocities as torpidly as Chaplains may extenuate the collateral damages, we see an escalation to extremes that Girard in his Clausewitz study saw developing in the modern state monopoly of violence and in the revolts it provokes. But we note that this occurs in a new international realm where opponents share a globalized power scheme under the overarching frame of a nuclear deterrent that functions as a new “umbrella of divine order.” In my work as a chaplain studying Girard’s career with students, we perceived a new setting, where medieval methods of torture grow into mimetic extremes of State terror. But the belief arose that Girard’s Christian perspective, culminating in his Clausewitz study, might hold a solution. 

As we read Girard’s career via the lens of his Augustinian-type conversion, as Joseph Niewiadomski has also proposed of late, its core appeared to be his radical critique of the West’s sacrificial view of redemption, which made the saving cross paradoxically turn into a source of reviled individualism. The idea that Christ’s gracious salvation offered a personal election could easily inspire hegemonic arrogance, while inversely, the divine Father’s demand of sacrificial obedience tended to incite atheist revolts and a Promethean type of rivalry that challenged eternal rules in matters of technical and social power, from medicine to ecology. In Girard’s vision, the ensuing escalation to extremes can be curbed only if this sacrificial reading of the Gospel is inverted. That would facilitate a new dialogue with the Orthodox and the Muslim hermeneutics of Christ’s prophetic message. Islam actually originated as a critique of the Pauline vision of Jesus (Isa) as a divine son sent to save humanity by a ritual sacrifice, which obscured the Q-tradition of the Gospel stressing ethical love and trust in the divine clemency. In turn, such a new focus on social coherence, in Girard’s understanding of “interdividualism,” will also align with the Orthodox focus on St John’s tradition of love, which sees the essence of human life rooted in God’s Trinitarian union.  

As the violent extremes are escalating to World War proportions, and a ceasefire with occasional shooting across demarcation lines is no solution, a trilateral reflection on the basis of Girard’s anti-sacrificial reading of the Gospel is indicated. To review the prophetic roots of these belligerent traditions and integrate the three hermeneutic lines anew, while we recognize the deviations that have engendered such ugly rivalries by ignoring the prophets’ order to halt each other’s victimization, may enable a collective resolve to face the mounting challenges of climate, biodiversity, and poverty crises. Putin’s stated ideal of a multipolar balance underpinning the BRICS opposition to Western hegemony is also bound to be stillborn without a shared reflection on its ideological roots of power and rivalry. Girard’s innovative view seems well designed to help realign the three hermeneutic lines of the Gospel that are underneath the conflicting social constructs. 

As at our previous annual meetings, the program was remarkable for its interdisciplinarity. Presenters in both plenary and parallel sessions addressed the theme from disciplines across the social sciences and humanities: anthropology, philosophy, art history, politics, theology, history, literature, technology, film, peacemaking—all in the spirit of open, inquisitive conversation that makes COV&R so stimulating and fruitful.

Besides mimetic theory, phenomenology was a second center of gravity that many of the plenary sessions revolved around. Several speakers touched on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, as when Stéphane Vinolo of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, raised the difference between desiring an object and desiring a face. René Girard is, for me at least, primarily a reader of texts, but these presentations brought out how his work can be complemented by, and perhaps even has an element of, phenomenology’s style of direct attention to lived experience. On top of mimetic theory and phenomenology, Columbia University’s David Freedberg, who has collaborated with Vittorio Gallese to investigate empathetic responses to images in light of the discovery of mirror neurons and embodied simulation, brought to bear the results of empirical research on mimesis at the neural level for a “bottom-up” view of basic human reality, prior to cultural mediation. “We underestimate,” Freedberg suggested, “the possibility of cross-cultural understanding.”

Like mimetic theory, phenomenology goes hand in hand with the question, framed most urgently in the Belfast accent of Ulster University’s Duncan Morrow, “What do we do?” As Sandor Goodhart of Purdue University remarked in a parallel session, if Girard provides the diagnosis, Levinas offers an ethical response. More than one speaker also turned to Jean-Luc Marion on the contrast between idols and icons and the desire for saturated experiences. Carla Canullo of the Università di Macerata, for instance, suggested that images of ruins saturate our seeing with a lack that desire seeks to fill. I found a consistent thread of asking how the desires evoked by images might point in a hopeful direction. While “positive mimesis” can, as Chris Fleming noted, have too much of a connotation of positivist certainty, reflection on ruins may clarify the difference between models of, as Morrow put it, “desire that leads to humanity or desire that leads to death.”

COV&R’s tradition of sessions devoted to recent books continued this year with Scott Cowdell’s Mimetic Theory and Its Shadow: Girard, Milbank, and Ontological Violence and the brand new collection of chapters by many hands, René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, Volume 1: Philosophy, Violence, and Mimesis, edited by Andreas Wilmes and George A. Dunn. Volume 2 will include an article by Geoff Shullenberger that he previewed in “Violence after Sacrifice: Girard, Foucault and Nietzsche’s Shadow.” Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s talk introduced the argument of his recent book, The War That Must Not Occur, by way of a compelling commentary on Christopher Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer.

This meeting also continued the more recent tradition of making space within its academic emphasis for turning theory to practice. UnRival sponsored an Art and Peace Café, as described below. The “Peace Panel” on the final morning tried a more interactive plenary format, with brief thoughts on the practice of peace from Reineke, Morrow, and Wolfgang Palaver seeding small-group discussion and sharing among attendees. Most of the plenary sessions, in fact, included a goodly amount of time for dialogue with the speakers, which, helped by the microphones in each room and often Tania Checchi’s own service as an interpreter, I found to be the most lively and engaging part. As Morrow had said in his previous plenary, “When we meet each other, both truth and the possibility of reconciliation emerge and are inseparable.”

One of the highlights of every COV&R meeting is the annual Raymund Schwager Award for best papers given by graduate students. This year’s first prize winner was Pierre Azou, a Ph.D. student at Princeton University in the Department of French and Italian with a Bachelor of Arts (2012) and a Master of Public Affairs (2014) from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po.), as well as a master’s degree in French literature from the Université La Sorbonne-Paris IV (2017). An emergency prevented him from attending, but a video of his paper, “Envy, Images and Dating Apps: ‘The End of Love’ According to Girard,” will be posted with the rest of the conference proceedings.

A second Schwager Award was given to Nicolas Aguia, a student of Roberto Solarte at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Columbia, who went on to receive a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Pittsburgh and is now a Ph.D. student in Latin American languages and literature at the Ohio State University. His paper was titled “Mimetic Images of Conflict and Accumulation: Negative Reciprocity in José Maria Arguedas’ Every Blood.” Its final section turns to the novel’s resolution of its violence through music: “Music interrupts rising conflict,” Aguia argues, and redirects “social relations to an object that no one can consume or appropriate.” His words brought to mind for me Dante’s use of music as a metaphor in the Paradiso for polyphonic relational harmony, which, in turn, captures my experience of our meeting: an extraordinarily diverse group enjoying the relations to each other mediated by our shared exploration of human reality, opened for each of us in some way by mimetic theory. 

A highlight for many this year was the Thursday evening screening of the almost-final version of Sam Sorich’s film, Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard, fresh from receiving the award for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Avignon International Film Festival. Full of archival footage and exclusive interviews, it not only teaches and delights but moves. We hope to have more news soon on further opportunities for viewing.

Art and Peace Café (from Lyle Enright, for the unRival team)

This year at COV&R, unRival Network had the absolute privilege of providing a space of welcome and excitement. Through food, music, and easygoing conversation, peacebuilder and unRival board member Joel Aguilar along with singer-songwriter and activist Diana Gameros invited attendees of this year’s Colloquium on Violence and Religion to see each other in new ways at unRival’s Art and Peace Cafe.

It’s easy to get excited about new ideas; at the Art and Peace Cafe, we reconnected with the people those ideas come from, “interdividuals” in real contexts, formed by places they love. Joel and Diana introduced a gentle, generous pause into the week so that we could have such an experience of one another.

We didn’t expect just how transformative the experience would be for some attendees! When lunch was over, everyone commented not only on the conversation, but on the space: the placement of the food, the feel of the chairs, the easiness of the atmosphere. We were already provided with a stunning, open room by Tania Checchi and our hosts at the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City. With the help of some patient and dedicated caterers and technicians, our guests felt free to move around, meet new people, and share new sides of themselves.

We had a first-hand experience of how 90 minutes in a carefully-crafted space can help people learn to be more human. We’re so grateful you shared it with us!

Practioners Meeting (from Mack Stirling)

On the last day of the recent conference in Mexico City a group of about 20 mimetic practitioners met for a late lunch, carrying on the tradition begun last year in Paris. The group was enlivened by the presence of five young men, attending COV&R for the first time, from five separate countries: Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and the US. They were particularly happy to have the opportunity for informal conversation at lunch outside of a conference session. We benefited greatly from the presence of Tony and Linda Bartlett, Scott Sherman, Debra Holden, and Martin Girard as we discussed ways that COV&R could better meet our needs as nonacademics—and ways that we could help in the dissemination of Girardian thought in our respective spheres. We will prepare a report for the COV&R board summarizing our discussion and look forward to continuing the “practitioners luncheon” in years to come.

The fifth essay is Jeremiah Alberg’s examination of mimetic desire and idolatry in the first and tenth films in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Decalogue (1989), a TV mini-series of ten sixty-minute films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments. The sixth is Richard van Oort’s inquiry into rivalry and violence in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and in the brilliant film adapted from it, Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957). The seventh essay, by Eric Gans, connects his ongoing research on culture and representation to Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume Cinéma (1983, 1985) and to the Duras-Resnais masterpiece of memory and trauma, Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

The final three essays engage popular films and TV series: Paolo Diego Bubbio on the blockbuster Star Wars franchise; George A, Dunn and Brian McDonald on the genre-bending blend of comedy, drama, and horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003); and Emma A. Jane on Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time (2010-2018), post-apocalyptic adventures involving a boy and his magical dog. Bubbio is enlightening on mythological narrative and sacrificial crisis; Dunn and McDonald are perceptive about the transformation of mimetic rivalry to positive mimesis; and Jane is illuminating on desire, violence, and social order.

I learned much from Mimetic Theory and Film, but I think that a few of the essays could have been developed more fully. Van Oort’s contribution on Shakespeare and Kurosawa is incisive, but it’s only twelve pages. Gans’s essay, too, is a little short and hurried, at fourteen pages. Contrast this with Goodhart’s essay, twenty-four pages, and Bubbio’s, twenty-eight. I have a similar response to the Introduction, which is eleven pages of text (mostly summarizing the essays to come) and three of notes. Bubbio and Fleming are experts on Girard—I would have liked to have heard more from them

Indeed I wish that Mimetic Theory and Film were a bigger book than it is, with more consistency among the essays, and with expanded coverage of major names and familiar films in cinematic history, names and titles that film critics and theorists recognize and know well, and that teachers of film courses include on their syllabi. 

While I was reading this collection, I was in the middle of making choices for a film course I will be teaching soon, and I was struck by how many of the films I was considering could be interpreted through a Girardian lens. It’s a long list that includes Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019)—and many others. Kazan, Scorcese, Coppola, Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan—great directors of significant films that intersect with Girard’s ideas. What might his work reveal to us about these films, and how might these, in turn, deepen and complicate his methodology and its impact?

Mimetic Theory and Film is, then, a significant book that beckons for companion books, supplementary volumes. Film, television, video on streaming services and social media: all of this is a vast, captivating, and perhaps alarming dimension of the world we live in. Girard’s insights and arguments equip us to understand these hyper-visual art forms and media more profoundly, and maybe to resist them as well. My prediction is that film will soon become the most dynamic field in Girard studies, the area of research and interpretation where the most original and exciting work will be located.

With an eye towards questions of humanity and justice in relation to lynching practices, Chapters Three and Four provide theoretical frameworks by which to understand the interconnectedness between racial violence, humanity, and morality. Chapter Three centers on how lynching reveals a type of violence where the perpetrators fully recognize the humanity of their victims, which in turn marked them as scapegoats. Ideologies of difference and power are scrutinized by Lancaster as he addresses how lynching symbolized “intra-human hierarchies” in this chapter (77). Chapter Four continues the author’s utilization of theoretical paradigms to further expose connections between lynching and American ideals of justice. Blending his voice with the virtuous violence theory of Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai, Lancaster makes a point to assess how lynching in the American South entailed ideas of honor, morality, and the preservation of white hegemony. Stepping into the mindsets of the lynchers, he notes how ideas of virtue and heroisms are products within the act of lynching itself. A highlight in this chapter is how Lancaster depicts connections between lynching and the social constructions of white identity. 

Chapter Five presents his most compelling arguments. Revealing the complex intersections of racial fears, sexuality, and anti-Black violence with regards to lynching, Lancaster adroitly speaks to the impetus behind cases of lynching and argues that the conflict of over desire is at the center of most lynching cases. Because allegations of rape and its attendant connotations of sexual desire have denominated discourses on lynching in the press, the author asserts that lynching revealed the “linkage between desire and violence” (135). For Lancaster, “lynching was but one means of removing the Black man from the sphere of white women’s sexual choices,” especially in Arkansas (128). 

Another high point in this chapter is Lancaster’s application of mimetic theory. Using mimetic theory as a lens by which to disclose the interconnections between desire and violence, Lancaster steps into conversation with René Girard, Wolfgang Palaver, and Paul Dumouchel as he unveils the surrogate mechanism in the lynching of Edward Cory, on February 21, 1892, in Texarkana, Arkansas. With mimetic theory as his lens, he asserts that the intricacies of lynching can often be revealed by the sacrificial ritual aspect of mob violence, “in which the deed having been perpetrated collectively for the reconciliation of the group. . .” (145). He further argues that “in many ways, the scapegoating form of violence serves as the culmination of other types of violence . . .within the phenomenon of lynching” (150). According Lancaster, “lynching is a group violence, perpetrated by a collectivity upon individuals who serve as representatives for another collectivity” (150). In one of the strongest chapters in his work, Lancaster reveals the utility of mimetic theory in exposing aspects of human nature in acts of lynching. 

A weakness in Lancaster’s book lies in the limited attention he gives to Girard’s other works. Notwithstanding his references to Violence and the Sacred, the reader—especially the Girardian reader—is left wondering how the author’s insights would have been enhanced had he investigated Things Hidden From the Foundation of the World (1978), The Scapegoat (1986), I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (2001), and Battling to the End (2010). For example, what if Lancaster had explored Girard’s arguments around the “stereotypes of persecution” or his ideas of around the “monstrous” spelled out in The Scapegoat and applied these concepts to acts of lynching in Arkansas? Certainly, Girard’s articulations around “myth,” “scandal,” and his concept of the “double bind” would have deepen Lancaster’s analysis around the existing rivalries between poor whites and wealthy white elites who were backed by the power of the state in meting out legal punishments and executions. Further, if Lancaster had examined the ways in which Girard employs the term of “lynching” within his own exposition of mimetic theory—albeit with less historical and cultural specificity—in Things Hidden and I See Satan Fall Like Lightening, his analysis would have unquestionably yielded far deeper insights into the surrogate mechanisms behind white supremacist ideologies and acts of terrorism. In addition, while Lancaster incorporates arguments from noted lynching scholars and examines the complexities of race, the incorporation of historical lynching statistics across the United States as well as an analysis of gender and class differences would have strengthened his arguments. However, these deficits in his analysis do not negate the ways in which he exhibits the salience of mimetic theory in understanding the nature of violence performed in lynchings—particularly lynchings enacted in North America.  

In sum, Lancaster’s work is captivating and broadens our understanding of racial violence in America. The concluding chapter of his book alerts readers to the violence of racism today and points out how hate crimes are modern productions of historical acts of lynching. Arguing that “in our modern era, we do not have lynchings—we have hate crimes,” Lancaster points out that “we do not have any unified opposition to the practice of lynching, however it might be manifest, but instead an array of desperate interests attempting to tackle the issue of police violence, hate crimes, economic inequality, and political disfranchisement, as if these were separate matters and not simply the manifestations of the same underlying structure” (159). He leaves his reader with the realization that the end of lynching is yet before us and is still with us as a society. For Lancaster, “the end of lynching, unfortunately, lies before us still” (162). 

It is observations of simian behavior that led to the discovery of mirror neurons that Haden rightly takes into account in his discussion of Girard’s attention to them; mimesis is baked into our hardware. But when Haden writes about “ontological identity needs” (48, 86, 119), about “ontological appetitive identity” (113), and “psycho-socio-spiritual needs” (48), he engages in a misleading confusion of desire and needs: the latter—food, shelter, procreation—are biological imperatives that humans instinctually share with other animal species; desire is unique to our species, a cultural generator born aloft by language. It essential to learning but it leads to violence when we imitate others’ desire for objects that cannot be shared. Whence mimetic desire is also a theory of internecine violence, also unique to our species. Genesis gives us a compact and coherent reading of this when it thematizes mimetic rivalry: our first parents’ temptation was to “become like gods”; Cain slays his brother out of envy for God’s favor. Haden’s recourse to an opaque “doctrine of original sin”—“Adam sinned (however we may understand this)” (144)—leads us away from biblical revelation, as available in the last and by no means least of the commandments, against every form of envy. The early chapters of Genesis, for starters, are good social science, compact and universal. The rest is history. 

Speaking of parsimony, it is safe to say that Jesus has one idea, God’s love for His creation and its human creatures, as expressed in “the law and the prophets” that he often invokes, while quoting psalms tellingly. Everything Jesus counsels is genially condensed in one Hebrew word as God’s “lovingkindness” (hesed), where the emotion everywhere mandates action, especially on behalf of the less fortunate. Indeed, Haden shows this in his discussion of the Good Samaritan story as well as the Sermon on the Mount and tales of a God-centered fellowship table from which none are excluded. (The Sermon also includes a thrice repeated warning against conflictual mimesis, as it urges against violent reciprocity by variants of “turning the other cheek.”)

Jesus paid for his life for having fleshed out the practical implications of the Law and questioned institutional disfigurements of it, whence his followers came to see him as the em-bodiment, Latin ”in-carnation,” of Yahweh, which Haden does not fail to acknowledge (112). But nowhere does he discuss the Mosaic origin of Israel’s principled argument against idolatry or ponder its internal logic, its compact, cogent semiology, and consequently idolatry’s ersatz recrudescence still among us. His critique of nationalism as idolatry neatly summarizes Isaiah’s scorn (44.9-20) when he writes as follows: “Idols are formed in the image of their makers, each projecting upon the idol one’s unconscious desire to play god, without admitting it ever recognizing such motives” (86). The aniconic, unimageable God of ancient Israel transcends all creation, and is consequently unavailable to representation within it; for this unique divinity there can be no name, as we have for rocks, and trees, and peoples—but the “Name,” (hashem), who identifies his Godself to Moses by a declarative sentence; “I am who am,” abbreviated as YHWH. Images, icons are proscribed because for ancient Israel, as for Augustine, God alone has being, we are but His images, reflections of His glory—or worse, refractions of that light, oblique deviations from it. Everything flows from His love and is mandated to flow back to Him (or Her, as Wisdom literature suggests), whose acknowledgement His chosen people are called to embody in their prayers and ritual practices as well as their daily conduct. The Torah’s injunction that Jesus endorses to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mk 12-30) (“all your resources, everything about you” in other translations) is to embody God’s love. We find no explicit mention of idolatry in Gospels because Jesus’ followers are imbued with its proscription, though it is abundantly denounced in numerous epistles, as anyone can discover via a Google search.

As to the concept of whiteness, there is an abundance of historical research (e.g, Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. NY: Liveright, 2021), showing that it only emerged as a result of the West’s imperial expansion into the “new world” and its encounter with peoples of different complexions. Race thereafter served as an alibi for the subjection of native populations and the import of African slaves dragooned for labor in the form of industrialized farming known as plantations, themselves a prototype of capitalism’s exploration of time/motion calculations for the exploitation of human labor. As a by-product of imperial expansion, whiteness, then, was conceived belatedly, over against these subject peoples; it was and remains a derivative, negative form of identity. This indeed is the case for nationalism as it emerged in Europe from the ruins of the Hapsburg empire and its Napoleonic mimetic double before it evolved a century later as a license for the very worst forms of violence known to history. 

It is true enough that ancient Israel’s worship is conceived over against the pagan idolatries surrounding it, and frequently overrunning it, and to whose allures it all too frequently relapsed; but its difference is marked by its positive and in no wise reactive promulgation of the law of love. Its own millennial tradition of internal critique is what, for Mary Douglas, qualifies it as a “modern religion” (Leviticus as Literature, NY: Oxford UP, 1999). The crucible for our modern sociologies of religion was forged at the Mount Sinai revelation with the Yahweh/idolatry difference. More generally, our social sciences are born of the Enlightenment critique of religion in the name of reason but no less so in the name of the victims of its violent practices, with (the casually antisemitic) Voltaire in the lead. The jargon-free classics of Tocqueville, Durkheim, Marx, and Max Weber endure, and, like our literary masterpieces, reward rereading (Girard’s idea of mimetic desire was inspired not by any phenomenology of mind but by Don Quixote). Over centuries scientific progress has proceeded apace with beneficent discoveries in medicine and with a ghastly harvest of victims, having reached its apogee with the god-like power of total annihilation, the absolute worst that human ingenuity, coupled with technological progress, can do. Billed as an exercise in “mimetic history,” Girard’s last book, Battling to the End, tracks the relentless “movement to extremes“ that Clausewitz observed of modern warfare; it completes a unified theory of history as available in the Bible’s intertwined testaments, more relevant than ever with the revival of Cold War nuclear arms race. With regard to all this, Haden’s book is a welcome and timely occasion to ponder what or whose gods are propitiated by this definitive sacrifice.