Research Catalog

Title

Can we survive our origins? : readings in René Girard's theory of violence and the sacred / edited by Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford.

Publication

East Lansing : Michigan State University Press, c2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Antonello, Pierpaolo.
• Gifford, Paul.
• Antonello, Pierpaolo
• Gifford, Paul

Description

xliii, 343 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

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 intrinsically violent runaway dynamic that characterizes human social organization in all periods of human history? Is violence decreasing in this time of secular modernity post-Christendom (as argued by Steven Pinker and others)? Or are we, rather, at increased and even apocalyptic risk from our enhanced powers of action and our decreased socio-symbolic protections? Rene Girard's mimetic theory has been slowly but progressively recognized as one of the most striking breakthrough contributions to twentieth-century critical thinking in fundamental anthropology: in particular for its power to model and explain violent sacralities, ancient and modern. The present volume sets this power of explanation in an evolutionary and Darwinian frame. It asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization, i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence, still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to-or should we look beyond-Darwinian survival? What-and where (if anywhere)-is salvation?

Series Statement

Studies in violence, mimesis, and culture

Uniform Title

• Project Muse UPCC books
• Studies in violence, mimesis, and culture.

Subject

• Girard, René, 1923-
• Girard, René, 1923-2015
• Violence > Religious aspects
• Sacred books > History and criticism
• Religions > Relations
• Sacred books

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Foreword / Rowan Williams -- A Covenant among Beasts; Human and Chimpanzee Violence in Evolutionary Perspective / Paul Dumouchel -- Liminal Crises: The Origins of Cultural Order, the Default Mechanisms of Survival, and the Pedagogy of the Sacrificial Victim / Pierpaolo Antonello -- Victims, Sacred Violence, and Reconciliation: a Darwinian-Girardian Reading of Human Peril and Human Possibility / Harald Wydra -- Empire of Sacrifice: Violence and the Sacred in American Culture / Jon Pahl and James Wellman -- From Closed Societies to the Open Society: Parochial Altruism and Christian Universalism / Wolfgang Palaver -- Girard, the Gospels, and the Symmetrical Inversion of the Founding Murder / Paul Gifford -- Survival and Salvation: A Girardian Reading of Christian Hope in Evolutionary Perspective / Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly -- Northern Ireland: Breaking the Inheritance of Conflict and Violence / Duncan Morrow -- Communities of Contrast: Modeling Reconciliation in Northern Ireland / Derick Wilson -- Girardian Reflections on Israel and Palestine / Mel Konner -- South Africa: Positive Mimesis and the Turn toward Peace / Leon Marincowitz -- Peace-Making in Practice and Theory: An Ancounter with René Girard / Scott Atran -- Nuclear Apocalypse: The Balance of Terror and Girardian "Misrecognition" / Jean-Pierre Dupuy -- The "Intermediary" Case / Margo Boenig-Liptsin -- Misrecognition of "Misrecognition" / Paul Dumouchel -- Survival without Salvation? / Paul Gifford -- Girard, Climate Change, and Apocalypse / Michael Northcott -- A New Heaven and a New Earth: Apocalypticism and Its Alternatives / Michael Kirwan.

ISBN

• 9781611861495
• 1611861497

OCLC

• 895728617
• SCSB-10998425

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library