So it turns out that instead of ordering Girard’s The Scapegoat as an audiobook, I got a CBC Radio 5-part special on Girard (part of a regular feature called Ideas, which has a very interesting list of programs which can be ordered, as audiobooks or as written transcripts). This was a serendipitous mistake, because the series is a very good introduction to Girard’s thought.
The title of the series is The Scapegoat: René Girard’s Anthropology of Violence and Religion, written and produced by David Cayley. My wife’s undergraduate degree is in Anthropology, from BYU. She says that many view this degree as a “high risk” degree in terms of one’s testimony of the Church, which some anecdotal evidence suggests is not a completely unfounded view (I’ve heard something similar about philosophy, at least at the graduate level, though I don’t even have anecdotal evidence regarding philosophy, and I presume the claim applies mostly to analytic philosophy, which doesn’t surprise me because of the tension between faith and reason lying, arguably, at the heart of modernity which of course analytic and Continental philosophy address quite differently—but I’m severely digressing, sorry).
My question in this post is: What are the potential conflicts between anthropology and faith, esp. as it pertains to Girard’s anthropology? Read the rest of this entry »
