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In recent years religion has resurfaced amongst academics, in many
ways replacing class as the key to understanding Europe's
historical development. This has resulted in an explosion of
studies revisiting issues of religious change, confessional
violence and holy war during the early modern period. But the
interpretation of the European wars of religion still remains
largely defined by national boundaries, tied to specific processes
of state building as well as nation building. In order to more
thoroughly interrogate these concepts and assumptions, this volume
focusses on terms repeatedly used and misused in public debates
such as "religious violence" and "holy warfare" within the context
of military conflicts commonly labelled "religious wars". The
chapters not only focus on the role of religion, but also on the
emerging state as a driver of the escalation of violence in the
so-called age of religious war. By using different methodological
and theoretical approaches historians, philosophers, and
theologians engage in an interdisciplinary debate that contributes
to a better understanding of the religio-political situation of
early modern Europe and the interpretation of violent conflicts
interpreted as religious conflicts today. By adopting a
multi-disciplinary approach, new and innovative perspectives are
opened up that question if in fact religion was a primary driving
force behind these conflicts.
The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion draws on the
expertise of leading scholars and thinkers to explore the violent
origins of culture, the meaning of ritual, and the conjunction of
theology and anthropology, as well as secularization, science, and
terrorism. Authors assess the contributions of Rene Girard's
mimetic theory to our understanding of sacrifice, ancient tragedy,
and post-modernity, and apply its insights to religious cinema and
the global economy. This handbook serves as introduction and guide
to a theory of religion and human behavior that has established
itself as fertile terrain for scholarly research and intellectual
reflection.
A systematic introduction into the mimetic theory of the
French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist
Rene Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars
(mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical
"difference") with the help of examples from literature and
philosophy. This book also offers an overview of Rene Girard's life
and work, showing how much mimetic theory results from existential
and spiritual insights into one's own mimetic entanglements.
Furthermore it examines the broader implications of Girard's
theories, from the mimetic aspect of sovereignty and wars to the
relationship between the scapegoat mechanism and the question of
capital punishment. Mimetic theory is placed within the context of
current cultural and political debates like the relationship
between religion and modernity, terrorism, the death penalty, and
gender issues. Drawing textual examples from European literature
(Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Stendhal, Storm, Flaubert,
Dostoevsky, Proust) and philosophy (Plato, Camus, Sartre,
Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Vattimo), Palaver uses mimetic theory to
explore the themes they present. A highly accessible book, this
text is complemented by bibliographical references to Girard's
widespread work and secondary literature on mimetic theory and its
applications, comprising a valuable bibliographical archive that
provides the reader with an overview of the development and
discussion of mimetic theory until the present day.
Studies into religion and violence often put religion first. Rene
Girard started with violence in his book Violence and the Sacred
and used the Durkheimian term 'sacred' as its correlate in his
study of early religions. During the unfolding of his theory, he
more and more distinguished the sacred from saintliness to address
the break that the biblical revelation represented in comparison to
early religions. This distinction between the sacred and
saintliness resembles Henri Bergson's complementing Emile
Durkheim's identification of the sacred and society with a dynamic
religion that relies on individual mystics. Girard's distinction
also relates to the insights of thinkers like Jacques Maritain,
Simone Weil, and Emmanuel Levinas. This element explores some of
Girard's main features of saintliness. Girard pleaded for the
transformation of the sacred into holy, not their separation.
Those who anticipated the demise of religion and the advent of a
peaceful, secularized global village have seen the last two decades
confound their predictions. Rene Girard's mimetic theory is a key
to understanding the new challenges posed by our world of resurgent
violence and pluralistic cultures and traditions. Girard sought to
explain how the Judeo-Christian narrative exposes a founding murder
at the origin of human civilization and demystifies the bloody
sacrifices of archaic religions. Meanwhile, his book Sacrifice, a
reading of conflict and sacrificial resolution in the Vedic
Brahmanas, suggests that mimetic theory's insights also resonate
with several non-Western religious and spiritual traditions. This
volume collects engagements with Girard by scholars of Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and situates them
within contemporary theology, philosophy, and religious studies.
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