Rene Girard (PhD)

Dr. Rene Girard was a French historian and social science philosopher, having authored nearly thirty books during his lifetime. His seminal work postulated that conflict, whether between individuals or among social groups, requires a target to blame, which effectively defuses this tension through what he termed as the "scapegoat mechanism" or "mimetic rivalry". Girard, originally a self-declared agnostic, was inspired by the religious transformations portrayed in the characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Russian novels. He later became a committed Roman Catholic and summarized Jesus's life and purpose as follows: "Christ is the only man to overcome the barrier erected by Satan. He dies in order to avoid participating in the system of scapegoats, which is to say the satanic principle. After his resurrection, a bridge that did not exist before is established between God and the world; Christ gets a foothold in the world through his own death, and destroys Satan's ramparts."