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Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (63)
Blending the science of acknowledged mystics—Dostoevsky, Weil, Péguy, Pascal, Hölderlin, and Augustine—with the insights of social scientists over the course of a long and distinguished career, René Girard contributed to an understanding of the mysticism of social life through focusing attention principally on the ersatz mysticism of metaphysical d...
From an historical point of view, the generic convergence of literature and religion has, to some extent, already been institutionalized through the Bible's influence upon the literary canon. Expanding upon and developing Larry D. Bouchard's idea that genre study is a critical hinge for linking the studies of religion and literature for historical,...
Aimed at an audience of scholars of medieval literature (rather than theologians of historical Christianity), this book offers a salutary reminder to its readers that Biblical interpretation during the Middle Ages included diverse views and took a variety of literary forms. Theresa Tinkle’s discussion ranges from the theological polemic of Saint Je...
Composed at a point of significant transition in the history of hagiography as a genre, due to changes in the canonization process, Raymond of Capua's Life of Catherine of Siena (1395) endeavors to attest to her heroic virtue by using both traditional discourse and the new scholastic discourse. Raymond's fidelity to Catherine's own doctrine of the...
This moving book defies facile description, commingling pilgrimage narrative, eulogy, mystical experience, systematic theology, memento mori, poetry, prayer, and spiritual reflections on the meaning of a theology lived in the face of death. Its mode of composition—a series of parting conversations with Daniel W. Hardy (1930–2007) whose scholarly li...
Marking the golden jubilee of the publication in 1961 of Rene Girard's acclaimed first book, Mensonge romantique et verite Romanesque [Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure), nine scholars from Austria, France, England, and the United States discuss the religious dimension of that work in a forum of short essays. They...
This is an impressive book that opens up a new chapter in the study of saints' lives. Thomas J. Heffernan's landmark work, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (1988), helped several generations of scholars to read the medieval lives of saints with a new appreciation for the literary conventions and rhetorical strategie...
Ann W. Astell, Professor of English and Chair of Medieval Studies at Purdue University, is the author of five books and the editor of three collections of essays. Her most recent book, Joan of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship (2003), blends the mimetic theory of René Girard with Harold Bloom's notion of the "anxiety of influence."
1. On empathy and G...
In the long history of thought about pardon, questions about the impossibility of forgiveness have traditionally arisen at one of two poles in the affected relationship: that of the injured party and its capacity to forgive or that of the offender, who must first beg and then accept forgiveness. Emphasizing the first of these, Emmanuel Levinas sees...
For me, the Scriptural Reasoning seminar was a “mountaintop experience,” a grace-filled (and plainly transformative) period of interpersonal exchange unlike any other I’ve known on this earth. There were times when I thought: Can this be real? Are we really doing this? Pouring over each other’s sacred texts together, like the sages of old, with the...
This book is a generous gift from the pen of scholar-poet Barbara Newman. A gift of scholarly devotion to the memory of the once famous Frauenlob, the praiser of our Lady and of ladies, known otherwise to his contemporaries as Heinrich von Meissen (1260–1318), it seeks to rescue him and his remarkable writings from oblivion. A gift to the memory of...
The autobiographical writings of Dorothy Day (1897–1980) feature a childhood memory of catastrophe and conversion, her traumatic experience at age eight of the earthquake that rocked San Francisco and Oakland in 1906, leaving half of San Francisco in ruins and sending 50,000 refugees in flight from the burning city, many of them in ferries across t...
A blockbuster in the theaters, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is also an academic phenomenon, in part because of the well publicized (and now litigious) criticism of the screenplay by biblical scholars, theologians, and historians of religion—a criticism that began months before the film's release on Ash Wednesday, February 25, 2004. Since...
Amidst Nazi persecution, Edith Stein discovered in the biblical images of God a mystical path of identity formation leading to a transformative union with Christ.
The Chaucer Review 39.3 (2005) 323-340
At the start of his classic essay "The Birth of Tragedy Out of Music" (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche declares:
Characterizing the two "art-inspiring deities, Apollo and Dionysos," as embodiments of rival creative tendencies (19), Nietzsche celebrates their temporary alliance in the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus. Foc...
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 4.1 (2004) 24-43
Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish philosopher and Talmudic commentator, whom Philippe Nemo calls "the sole moralist of contemporary thought," died in 1995. Two years later, in 1997, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) was named a Doctor of the Church. What, if anything, do the spiritu...
"Empathy" and "contagion" are semantically related in their
common reference to the suffering of infectious disease,
spiritual and physical. How exactly do they differ as inter-personal
phenomena? René Girard establishes a link between mimetic behavior
and the contagious transference of emotion that spreads through groups
of people, resulting in vi...
Politics, piety, and militancy are often intermingled. We observe this in our own time (often to our pain), just as we note it in figures from the past. This intermingling is one of the more unusual and widely noted characteristics of Joan of Arc (1412?—31). Joan of Arc is an unusual saint. Canonized in 1920 as a virgin, she died in 1431 as a conde...
When I told a colleague of mine that I was studying Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, he replied, “I’ll be curious to leam what you discover. It’s hard to imagine that virago [Joan] and the humble Handmaid [Mary] together.” Many scholars who have taken a more considerate view of Joan’s spirituality seem to share my colleague s spontaneous reaction....
Joan of Arc is an unusual saint. Canonized in 1920 as a virgin, she died in 1431 as a condemned heretic. Uneducated, militant, and youthful, she obeyed 'Voices' that counselled her to pursue an unprecedented vocation. The various trial records provide a wealth of evidence about how Joan and others understood her spiritual life. This collection expl...
A host of modern authors have portrayed Joan of Arc as a heroine. Identifying with the medieval saint and martyr as a figure of the artist, they tell her story as a way of commenting on their own situation in a world where the aura of art has decayed. Blending the theoretical insights of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and René Girard, Ann W. A...
Challenged to respond to Nazi heresy and to offer practical assistance to persecuted Jews, Christians who were caught in the crucible of the Third Reich learned to read the Bible differently. After Auschwitz, we are still learning from their example.
Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 2.1 (2002) 125-127
As the title suggests, Thomas F. Ryan's book emphasizes the importance of biblical commentary as a record of historical reader response and presents Saint Thomas's specific way of interpreting the Book of Psalms as a manifestation of his (and his audience's) Dominican spirituality. Th...
The Commentary on the Psalms is the least studied of Cassiodorus's sixth-century works. Close knowledge of it significantly alters our understanding of the Introduction to Divine and Human Readings, with which it should be paired. The Commentary serves to establish the Bible as the source for all the liberal arts and a model for rhetorical imitatio...
Ælfric's On the Old and New Testament includes a brief synopsis of the story of Judith, the Hebrew widow who decapitated the Assyrian general, Holofernes. In it, Ælfric refers his friend Sigeweard to an English version of the Liber Judith which has been written ‘eow mannum to bysne, þæt ge eowerne eard mid wæmnum bewerian wiþ onwinnendne here’. Ælf...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1987. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 516-531). Photocopy.