Fifty years after its publication in English, Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel(1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has bec
From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, Rene Girard’s mimetic theory is presented as elucidating “the origins of culture.” He posits that a
Are religions intrinsically violent (as is strenuously argued by the new atheists’)? Or, as Girard argues, have they been functionally rational instruments developed to manage and cope with the intrin
"The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies often polarizes around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, p