@CACRadicalGrace @RichardRohrOFM "In the long run, violence leaves both sides in an endless and impossible cycle that cannot be stopped by itself. Instead, some neutralizing force must be inserted from outside to stop the cycle of violence and point us in a new direction."
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Copy of tweet: Here’s Rev. Dr. MLK Jr.’s closest non-black ally, Heschel: “Neither words of persuasion nor threats of castigation will have any effect. Something greater than prophetic words, namely, an eschatological event, will be necessary to silence the arrogance of man.”
@iyad_elbaghdadi end/ Girard, of course, thought humanity so deeply habituated into patterns of escalating violence, and the scapegoat mechanism to be so perfectly self-justifying, that he concluded some form of concrete, transcendent intervention necessary for world redemption and salvation.
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“Reciprocal action, mimesis, is both responsible for escalation and deescalation depending on what actions are being imitated. The reason that people fight more and more is that there is a truth approaching against which their violence reacts. Panic in the system. In the Christian world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims and whose return is heralded by the very effects of the escalation to extremes. What will he declare? That we have gone crazy, that the adulthood of humanity, which he announced through the cross, is a failure. Postponing reconciliation always causes violence to increase. We have to think of reconciliation not as a consequence but as the reverse of the escalation to extremes. We have to at all costs avoid thinking of war as a passage towards reconciliation. It is more than ever up to each one of us to hold back the worst.” René Girard