Political Correctness and the Death of Education – Requiem for a Dream
In The One By Whom Scandal Comes (2014) René Girard writes: “Every culture takes a dim view of anyone who does not unconditionally prefer the native to the…
Patriarchal Culture
In the nineteen fifties, Lawrence Kohlberg produced a theory of moral development. The three main levels are pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. In nineteen eighty-two, Carol Gilligan published…
On Nietzsche and Hamlet: How Shakespeare Mirrors Sick Moderns
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the…
Shakespeare: Three Plays About Human Desire
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theme of romantic desire prohibited by the parents is treated in a very deliberate way. When parents, in opposition, stand…
Beware the Ides of March: Everybody Loves to Hate a Scapegoat
“Beware the Ides of March!” As it does every year, this March fifteenth affords us the opportunity to contemplate the recurrent patterns of history. Yet what exactly…
Living Out “The Bacchae” (America Burns)
Part I – The Bacchae. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in his Birth of Tragedy (1871), Euripides (480 – 406 BC), whose main activity coincided with the nihilistic destructiveness of the…
René Girard and the Common Good
I argue that Girard’s understanding of the political order is largely in line with Thomistic thinking on the common good. In following Girard in his extrapolations of…
Death to the Death Penalty? René Girard’s Challenge to Thomas Aquinas
The Catholic Church’s recent definitive revocation of the death penalty[1] suggests that something in the zeitgeist demands a rethinking of one strand of conservative thought. Always the…
René Girard’s Challenge to Fusionism
Modern American conservatism rose in the 1950s under the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank S. Meyer at the old National Review magazine, culminated in 1980 with…
Reading the Signs of the Times Without Surrender
René Girard’s mimetic theory has described how mimesis leads to collective violence. His readings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy argue that tragedy reveals the origins of violent…
Oedipus Rex in René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred
Sigmund Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex has entered popular consciousness. It names the tendency of boys to become romantically infatuated with their mothers, and girls with…
Two Kinds of Sacrifice: René Girard’s Analysis of Scapegoating
Mimesis and Scapegoating Humans are intensely mimetic. We learn to talk, walk, and nearly everything else by imitation. But because we also imitate each other’s desires, other…
The Gift – Marcel Mauss and René Girard
Gifts are universal. Every culture on Earth has and will always exchange gifts. The effect of gifts is to tie people together; to connect them. This is…
René Girard – Imitation and Life Without God
In preparation for teaching a literature course in the 1950s, René Girard reread some of the classic novels. In the process, he realized that the novelists had…
The Millenarian Platonism of Alain Badiou (Part II)
Plato’s Republic. Alain Badiou with Susan Spitzer, trans. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2015. Part 2: Voegelin and Girard on Badiou. This is the second instalment in a three-part…