Our next monthly meeting will be held on Friday, July 10th from 3:00pm to 4:30pm. We will be discussing ““A Twice-Told Tale”: The Wars of Religion as Girardian Myth” by William T. Cavanaugh from the Fall-Winter 2018 (Volume 45.3-4) issue of Communio entitled “Peace and Homo Viator”.
The following is taken from the Introduction to the issue:
The Church’s apocalyptic struggle with the powers of the world does not contradict, but rather confirms and communicates, the peace toward which she looks and from which she already lives. William T. Cavanaugh, in “‘A Twice-Told Tale’: The Wars of Religion as Girardian Myth,” presents the view that religion is inherently violent as a “myth” that hides the violence of the modern state. According to Cavanaugh, this founding myth of modernity invents the very opposition between private religion and public reason that the state claims to reconcile. “Just as religion was not a cause but a product of the wars that founded the state, so reason, as the Enlightenment came to use the term, and the reason/violence dichotomy, are not the cause but the products of the state’s securing a monopoly on legitimate violence.” In conversation with René Girard, Cavanaugh discusses how this scapegoating of religion is itself a religious claim, one that deprives the public order of the one sacrifice that offers lasting peace: the Cross of “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
We had hoped to arrange for an in person session. But we aren’t there yet. Instead, we will be meeting via video conferencing.
Charles has requested that we take some time during the meeting to discuss planning for the upcoming Study Day. We are still looking at David Bentley Hart’s book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation.
If you would like to read the book in advance, you can order it here:
https://www.amazon.ca/That-All-Shall-Saved-Universal-ebook/dp/B07X8BRSM2/
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.