Girard scholars meet in Mexico City

Girard Scholars Meet in Mexico City

CRES theologian, Professor Scott Cowdell, joined over a hundred scholars from around the world in June for the annual conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. Held at a seventeenth-century Jesuit college in Mexico City, the conference theme was “Desire Among the Ruins: Mimesis and the Crisis of Representation”.

Professor Cowdell presented a paper entitled “Barthes and Girard on Mythical (Mis)Representation”, and there was a 90-minute session devoted to his 2023 book Mimetic Theory and its Shadow: Girard, Milbank, and Ontological Violence. He joined Catholic theologian Brian Robinette from Boston College, with colleagues from the Australian Girard Seminar—Joel Hodge (ACU) and Chris Fleming (Western Sydney University)—on a panel discussing “Victim Identity, Religion and the Sacred in Modernity”, contributing a paper on the spirituality/religion dichotomy.

Next year’s conference will be held at the ACU campus in Rome, organised by the Australians. Scott, Joel and Chris have also been invited to plan and edit The Bloomsbury Handbook of Mimetic Theory on the strength of their Bloomsbury Academic Series “Violence, Desire, and the Sacred”, which currently stands at 12 volumes.