Beguiling Belonging

“What if true goodness does not need our protection, and what if any ‘goodness’ that we feel that we need to protect is likely fake? This is the question that James Alison asks us to consider in the chapters that make up this volume…. Following René Girard, he asks us to look inward and to examine ourselves prayerfully in the light of grace.

“Alison shows us what he has learned through his experience of sitting with his own pain and the pain of others, namely, that the love of God is not subject to the laws of our manufactured forms of belonging and is not bound by our fears of being exposed as constructors of fake goodness.”
—from the foreword

Beguiling Belonging rethinks questions of catholicity, ecclesiology, and belonging through the lens of René Girard’s anthropology. The chapters examine how Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection unmask humanity’s scapegoat mechanism and demonstrate that, in Christ’s self-offering, this violent dynamic is decisively undone. The result is an invitation for Christians to rediscover their identity not as belonging to a sacred institution that draws boundaries around “insiders” and “outsiders,” but rather to a reconciling body that refuses to remain blind to its collective tendencies toward creating false unity at the expense of others.

James Alison is an internationally recognized Catholic priest and theologian. He has spent his theological career exploring the fecundity of the systematic theology of René Girard. He is also known for his career-long insistence on trying to tell the truth about matters LGBTQ+ within the Catholic Church and exercising a pastoral role in this field.