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Article: Force and violence. (Correspondence).
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- March 1, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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J. Bottom's essay "What Violence Is For" (December 2001) accurately portrays some of the basic theses of Rene Girard's "anthropology of the Cross," but it misses other crucial ones and thus misapplies Girard's work in interpreting recent events. The primary theses that Mr. Bottum has missed involve the role of secularity in shaping the history of the "Christian" West. Mr. Bottum thus portrays too radical a distinction between the West and its Islamic cultural counterparts in a way that suggests the superiority of the former over the latter.
When Girard first argued for the superior revelatory power of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Part 2 of Things Hidden Since ...