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Of course I copied this idea from M C Escher. Mimesis.  Look at two little children playing. By and large the toy that little Alice wants to play with is not the biggest or the prettiest or the sparkliest one in the box; it is the one that Beatrice happens to have right now. So by subterfuge or main force Alice gains control of the coveted toy from Beatrice, and Beatrice, unperturbed grabs something else from the toybox. Alice immediately drops her recently won prize and puts all her efforts into gaining Beatrice's new plaything. All who have children know and despair of this behaviour, but really, it is just the expression of a universal human instinct. We are born helpless and in the first few years of our life have to acquire an enormous amount of information and learn enough behaviours that we can function in our society. We do this largely, says Rene Girard, by mimesis - that is, miming or copying the people we see around us. There are, of course, a certain number of o...

During the troubles in Northern Ireland all those many years ago, those of us on the sidelines looked on with incredulity at what was happening between Protestants and Catholics. The news was dominated by images of bombings and fires and assassinations, and, from this distance, no one was quite sure which side was doing these terrible things or why; radical Catholic and Protestant groups seemed to be pretty much indistinguishable from each other in their barbarity, their strategies and their modus operandi. And so it is with all conflict. Rene Girard describes conflict as " a subtle destroyer of the differential meaning it seems to inflate ", and when I first read that sentence a week or two ago I had to go for a bit of a walk and think about it for a bit. Girard is right, as he is about so much, and what I think he means is this: We learn pretty much everything, says Girard, by copying from other people. This applies to skills and behaviours but also to attitudes an...

It happens sometimes. I have a question or am pondering some conundrum or other and the right book arrives at pretty much the right time. In a session with my supervisor a few months back Paul mentioned an article by Rene Girard, whom I had never heard of. I read the article and over the past month have read two of his books, The Scapegoat and this one. I have another couple sitting on my shelf and they have elbowed all others in my to be read pile out of the way and sit firmly on the top. Girard has pulled a number of threads together for me: he has enabled me to rethink the atonement in a way which is consistent with an evolving Universe: he presents a view of scripture which is again consistent with what I know of science but is also faithful to the Bible as the Word of God; he has given me, for the first time in my life a theology (if that is the right word) of Satan which makes sense to me. Most importantly for me, he is consistent with my own lived experience of God's s...