Abstract

One of the primary figures of the so-called religious turn of continental philosophy of religion at the turn of the twenty-first century, René Girard was one of the most important and influential Christian writers at the time of his death. His legacy is at this time questionable, as his writing is often employed as a philosophical justification for Christian supersessionism and the prioritization of Christian hermeneutics of the Hebrew Bible, all while providing helpful interpretive insight into scripture, human anthropology, and psychology. This chapter proposes Girard as a radical thinker whose ideas have been domesticated, and introduces his work in an accessible way.