A Sound of Sheer Silence

In the last post, I talked a bit about Rene Girard's theory of memetic rivalry.  Conveniently, yesterday provided an excellent example of this process in action. At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama was talking about ISIS.  ISIS is, of course, very bad, a fact that the President was clear to state.  However, he pointed out that those of us in the Christian camp live a in glass house with regard to religiously-motivated violence.  In particular, he pointed to the Crusades as an example of the same kind of religiously motivated violence seen in ISIS appearing in a Christian context. Religious conservatives lost their minds .  How dare you compare the Crusades to ISIS's jihad ?  Certain kinds of Catholics, notably the dangerous lunatic Bill Donohue of the "Catholic League," argue that the Crusades were a "just war," and thus nothing like the violence of ISIS.  Said another way, "our violence in the name of God was totally justified, but ...

In the last two years or so, I have been in the process of digging deep and trying to figure out this religion thing and how I fit into it.  It has been disorienting in many ways, but finding that the standard traditional Catholic apologetics have not been working has been an impetus to seek out other voices.  And, as it turns out, there is a ton of interesting stuff out there, things that have changed the way I look at Christianity. There is a ton of good stuff to be found, but the biggest revelation has been the work of a French literary critic/anthropologist/theologian Rene Girard.  I tried reading Girard a couple of times in the past, and it never really "clicked" until about six months ago when I finished his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.   His ideas are not easy, and his works are in translation from French, but it is worth the effort to dig through it.  In the next couple of posts, I am going to try to work through how I understand Girard's thou...