This session brings mimetic theory into dialogue with theology, pedagogy, and contemporary theories of identity to explore how desire shapes personal and communal formation. The first paper presents a pedagogical framework for teaching the lives of the saints in Catholic religious education, emphasizing the saints’ conversion of desire as a model for adolescent development. Drawing on Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, positive mimesis, and affective conversion, it proposes ways educators can invite students to critically reflect on their own desires through figures like St. Ignatius of Loyola. The second paper engages queer and crip theologies alongside mimetic theory to critique the limits of rigid identity categories. While queer and crip perspectives challenge binaries, mimetic theory reveals how such categories can still participate in cycles of exclusion and violence. Together, these papers explore alternative models of identity grounded not in rivalry or social comparison, but in openness to divine and transformative desire.
This paper integrates the theory of mimetic desire with theology and pedagogy to offer an approach to the presentation of the lives of the saints in Catholic religious education, one which foregrounds the saints’ conversion of desire, encourages reflection on desire, and offers alternative models of desire. First, this paper briefly situates the saints in religious education and reviews literature on models in adolescent development. Second, it identifies three movements in the conversion of desire: renouncing acquisitive desire and reorienting one’s desire toward God, as described by René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, and a subsequent commitment to the imitation of God, supported by the theories of positive mimesis and affective conversion. It concludes with a framework for presenting the lives of the saints, using St. Ignatius of Loyola as a case study for inviting adolescents to reflect on their desires using a historical model.
Mimetic theory, crip theology, and queer theology all accentuate the inadequacy of grounding identity in rigid categories. Where crip and queer theories critique binaries for their inability to hold the fluidity and instability of identity, mimetic theory identifies their power to fuel the dangerous cycle of blame, victimhood, and ultimately, violence. These insights from queer and crip theories offer a vital contribution. However, a danger remains: that “queer” or “crip” lose their original power and morph into reinscriptions of the exclusive categories they were designed to dismantle. Here, mimetic theory can help. This paper uses mimetic theory to construct new dimensions of the crip and queer critiques of identity categorizations. An identity grounded not in the social other, but in the Other, is capable of holding the expansive complexity of social and embodied fluidity, while also remaining detached from the sway of competitive and exclusionary relationality.