Category: Texts
Facing down the wolf: a gay priest’s vocation
Lies and violence in the heart of family and church life. That’s where my testimony begins. For whatever reason of God’s own, I have received the formal commission to live this reality as a priest… failure is one of grace’s preferred building sites.
Queerology podcast
James discusses his faith journey, René Girard and mimetic theory, the scapegoat mechanism, Sacred (or Holy) vs. Mysticism (or Mythification) of Divine as churches crumble, intelligence of victim, and grace and growth.
Some notes for a Girardian reading of the Book of Revelation
Theological thinking is slow thinking… It is much more like feeling your way into a new relationship than it is achieving clarity about a new definition. And it is here that I think René Girard’s insight is so helpful, both as to method and as to content.
On how Pope Francis is changing the Church
The real joy of the gospel is found in groups of sinners who sit lightly to their sins, know they are loved, and long to love better starting from where they are.
The story behind the phone call from the Pope
I was being stretched by the tiniest glimpse of something true received, already, in my early adolescence: that ultimately the Catholic faith would embrace and include the gay heart; that the two held together give glory to God; and that it is better to die than to let go of that.
Clericalism and the Violent Sacred: dipping a Girardian toe in troubled waters
When Paul urges his listeners to become his imitators in offering himself up as sacrifice, just as Paul imitates Christ; or Peter tells his that they are living stones of the long-awaited New Temple: both take for granted that to be in Christ is a fundamentally priestly form of life.
Stretching Girard’s hypothesis: road marks for a long-term perspective
What might those who follow the thought of René Girard have to offer to those currently excavating Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey?
The unexpected shape of forgiveness
One can, and some do, read Martel’s book as an accusation against the world of systemic mendacity which it reveals. For my part, I read it as one of the events which signal that God’s forgiveness is at last reaching even the hardest-hearted parts of our Church.
Welcome to my world… (notes on the reception of a bombshell)
So, the other shoe has finally dropped. The veil has been removed from what the French rather gloriously call a “secret de Polichinelle” – an open secret: one that “everybody knows” but for which the evidence is both elusive and never really sought. The merely anecdotal is, at last, acquiring the contours of sociological visibility.