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Renee Girard and Mimetic Theory

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  Bibliography Girard, R. (1999, 2001).  I See Satan Falling Like Lightning.  (J. G. and Foreward, Trans.) Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Girard, R. (2013, 1997, 1972).  Violence and the Sacred.  (P. Gregory, Trans.) New York: Bloomsbury. Palaver, W. (2013).  Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory (Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture.  East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University. Pannenberg, W. (1998, 1991).  Systematic Theology.  Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Taylor, C. (2007).  A Secular Age.  Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.     This exploration into the thought of Rene Girard will focus upon his insight into the mimetic cycle. While he discusses his personal conversion to Christ, it has little influence upon evaluating the validity of mimetic theory. I will focus upon the insights his theory yields in biblical and theological studies, especially related to St. Augustine. I express a caution. Girard offers a monolithic theory through whi
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Process Philosophy

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                 The importance of a process-oriented philosophy patterned after Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) is its thorough grounding in science combined with its metaphysical dimension that makes it like the systems of Leibniz and Hegel.   Events are the basic components of nature and passage, or creative advance, is its most fundamental feature. Such views are like the anti-mechanistic philosophy of change we find in Henri Bergson. Charles Hartshorne would expand his influence in the United States. He also saw the definite character of events as due to the ingression of timeless entities, a Platonic notion. He understood religion as reaching its deepest level in the solitude of humanity as it forms the attitude of the individual toward the universe.  He called his metaphysics the philosophy of organism. The universe consists of becoming, each moment a process of appropriating and integrating the infinity of reality provided by the antecedent universe and by God as the abiding
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