Girard and the Myth of Religious Violence
There is something ironic about an address to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion by the author of The Myth of Religious Violence. To an outsider it would appear that we are deeply at odds. Your learned society is dedicated to the exploration of the link between religion and violence, while I am...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2018
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| In: |
Does religion cause violence?
Year: 2018, Pages: 7-24 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Girard, René 1923-2015
B Violence |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | There is something ironic about an address to the Colloquium on Violence and Religion by the author of The Myth of Religious Violence. To an outsider it would appear that we are deeply at odds. Your learned society is dedicated to the exploration of the link between religion and violence, while I am dedicated to debunking that link. A few years ago, I was asked to contribute a chapter to The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence. I submitted an essay entitled “Why This Book Is a Very Bad Idea”: the editor changed my title. Some might suppose that I am here to tell you that the Colloquium on Violence and Religion is, likewise, a very bad idea, but that is not the case. In fact, I will argue that we are in fundamental agreement about what I call the “myth of religious violence.” I will explore the work of René Girard, around which the colloquium is organized, and argue that—far from supporting the myth of religious violence—the work of Girard, in fact, undermines it. It does so in two ways. First, there is an important sense in which the author of Violence and the Sacred undermines the religious/secular distinction upon which what I refer to as the myth of religious violence depends. Second, Girard critiques the scapegoating of religion by secularists. The myth of religious violence, as I define it, is a myth in the precise sense in which Girard uses the term: a story that encodes a méconnaissance or mis-knowing about how violence is actually cured. Rather than religion representing the cure for violence, as Girard would have it, the myth of religious violence proclaims a secular cure for the violence that religion uniquely embodies.... |
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| ISBN: | 9781501333866 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Does religion cause violence?
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5040/9781501333866.ch-001 |
