This session explores the enduring influence of mimetic theory in interpreting both interpersonal conflict and contemporary literature. The first paper engages Stephen Karpman’s “Drama Triangle” alongside René Girard’s theories of desire and opposition, showing how the recurring roles of Persecutor, Victim, and Rescuer in conflict mirror cinematic portrayals of heroism and villainy. By placing Girard in dialogue with conflict psychology and film, the paper suggests that Christian nonviolence offers a counter-narrative to the moral scripts of popular media. The second paper turns to the fiction of Michel Houellebecq, whose novel Submission critiques and yet unwittingly enacts key Girardian insights. Though Houellebecq's narrator dismisses mimetic theory, his fiction reveals characters caught in webs of triangular desire, grappling with the consequences of secularization and political fatigue. Together, these papers offer fresh perspectives on how mimetic patterns shape both our cultural imagination and our understanding of conflict, desire, and ethical possibility.
In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book
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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.
Papers
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.
Join The Hymn Society's Director of Research, Dr. Stephanie Budwey, for a presentation on the history and current hymnody of the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
This presentation considers the role that Christian sacred music has played in the movement for equal rights in the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Just as music played an instrumental role in the Civil Rights Movement, it has also been a driving force in the struggle for justice in the LGBTQIA2S+ community. This exploration includes examining the songs themselves and collections of songs, including the Metropolitan Community Church’s Trial Hymnal (1981) and Hymnal Project (1989–1993), as well as the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada’s 2019 collection Songs for the Holy Other: Songs for: Hymns Affirming the LGBTQIA2S+Community. Additionally, this presentation draws from interviews with Christian pastors and musicians from around the world and U. S. contemporary artists Flamy Grant, Jennifer Knapp, and Semler to consider the role that music has played in the struggle for justice for the LGBTQIA2S+ community both inside and outside of church walls.
Religious conflict and the conditions which sustain religious pluralism are front and center in these times, and the need for scholarship that is global, interdisciplinary, and relevant is urgent. Rice University’s Boniuk Institute, led by Elaine Howard Ecklund, has hosted two global convenings of scholars of religious pluralism and conflict and is seeking to gather scholars at AAR to discuss the current context and a future agenda for research in these areas. Through these gatherings, the Boniuk Institute connecting scholars to each other and to the Institute in view of future grant-funded global project.