Friends: I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York in conversation with David Brooks on Monday, June 15, ahead of the release of my upcoming book “The One and the Ninety-Nine” that week. If you’re in the NYC area, I would love to meet you there! Tickets are on sale now—you can grab one right here.

And now, for all the Girardians, an essay that I began writing three years ago… If you prefer audio, I recorded the whole thing for you myself (50 minutes), above. Or if you’d like to read it in a slightly more beautiful format, you can find the essay here. Thank you, as always, for reading.

Political Judas—An Essay

Today many of us have an odd feeling that we can’t put our finger on. It feels like both the best of times and the worst of times, and global events seem “cataclysmic, yet insignificant.”¹ It’s as if we’ve managed to catch not a tiger by the tail but rather a mouse.

The nature of this Muridaean battle is fundamentally religious. Nearly all contentious things today, from abortion to vaccines to foreign policy, are spoken of in latent religious terms like sacrifice, victimhood, reparation, excommunication—and public acts of repentance are common.² Politics has not replaced religion, but rather allowed itself to be the migratory destination of the holy.³ In short: politics is inherently more religious in an irreligious world.⁴

There has been a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood.⁵ But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.

One assumption being challenged right now is human agency. With the advent of increasingly powerful forms of artificial intelligence and the narrative emphasis on systems and processes of which we are a part (political, economic, social), perhaps the debate over free speech is a cover-up for a more important conversation: free will.⁶

The tension between slavery and freedom lies at the heart of the great political and technological questions of our time, and at the heart of René Girard’s theory. To what extent is a man free to transcend the political machinations of his age? To what extent is disengaging from mimetic processes even possible? The idea or reality of agency, or free will, lies at the heart of these questions.

This essay will explore these questions in the light of Girard’s mimetic theory, but I’d like to begin in what may seem like a surprising place: the biblical story of Judas Iscariot, the apostle of Christ. He will be our lens through which we shall explore this question of agency as it relates to mimesis.

Right out of the gate, we have to grapple with the question of Judas’s freedom: the Gospels of Luke and John tell us that Judas became demonically possessed before he betrayed Christ, giving the reader the impression that his betrayal of Jesus was part of a fatalistic, cosmic plan.⁷

Was Judas at the mercy of a mimetic process that was beyond his power to escape?⁸ In the earlier part of his career, Girard presents Judas as a mere pawn:

There is no special difficulty in understanding why the Gospels treat the pseudo-conspiracy of Judas and the ecclesiastical authorities in the way that they do. This conspiracy is presented as real but powerless. Jesus is the victim of a mimetic contagion that spreads to the whole community, and there can be no question of viewing him as the victim of one particularly evil individual, or even of several. The ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance, since everything culminates in the unanimous movement that is being formed against Jesus.⁹

To say that “the ways in which individuals behave are never of more than secondary importance” is seriously to denigrate the realm of the personal—most importantly, the ability of a person to act with intentionality. In my view, the early Girard does not do justice to the role traditionally ascribed to the will, the seat of human action. He misses an opportunity to clarify the role or even the possibility of intentionality in moral acts.¹⁰

I believe the later Girard, had he revisited the Judas question, would have used the opportunity to clarify the role of agency in his theory while respecting its mystery and drama.

After all: Peter, too, betrayed Christ—but his outcome was very different.

Part I: Three Types of
Political Atheism

Freedom is intimately connected to belief. A person who does not at least believe he is free isn’t free in any meaningful sense. What one believes helps determine the realm of possibility for action. The will is not moved to do anything for which it can’t at least hope for the possibility of success.

I propose that Girard used the term political atheist to refer to a specific rejection of belief: in the state, or in a politician (or party), claiming to be divinely ordained or having a divine mandate. This claim formed the basis of the cult of Caesar Augustus at the time of Jesus. Christ desacralized it. Of course, many politicians since Augustus have been associated with a divine mandate, whether they explicitly claim it or not. The idea of “atheism” in Girard’s phrase refers, first and foremost, to a rejection of a belief in claims of sacred power in the political order.¹¹

But the rejection of a prior belief can be a dangerous and despairing thing unless it is replaced by a different belief. The political figure of Judas, I will argue, moves through two different manifestations of political atheism. In the end, he despairs without ever experiencing the third: a form of political atheism that we might even call Christian.

The first variety of political atheist is one who has retreated from the political processes completely, into the underground.¹² Nihilism is “not enough,” but it can be an understandable first response to the disillusionment that people feel when their political aspirations and hopes are dashed—when the person or thing they believed in as salvific is revealed to be fallible and temporary. This is what I’ll call the black-pilled political atheist: one who, as a response to the realization that their trust has been misplaced, adopts a fatalistic and hopeless stance toward the world.¹³

The second type of political atheist is the Machiavellian: one who sees politics principally as the struggle for power, which he, or his preferred political candidate, must win at any cost.¹⁴ The ends justify any means. The Machiavellian political atheist might emerge from the black-pilled state, or he may precede it. Judas, as we’ll see, appeared to move between the two.

The third type of political atheist, however, is the Christian who responds to a corrupt political world that demands belief in its own illusory power. The Christian political atheist situates his belief in something, or someone, that transcends worldly politics. In this way, he becomes immunized from the volatility and anxiety associated with those who have invested their belief in the power of the state to provide solutions to the most fundamental human problems.

Girard’s original use of the term came in his 1961 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In it, he referred to the French writer Stendhal as an “atheist in politics” (athée en politique). Stendhal’s spirit of political atheism is embodied in Julien Sorel, the protagonist of his novel The Red and the Black.¹⁵

When Julien learns that his former employer has switched parties, he smiles. Girard comments on this scene: “Julien savors the ‘conversion’… as a music lover who sees a melodramatic theme re-appear under a new orchestral disguise. Most men are taken by disguises. Stendhal places a smile on Julien’s lips so that his readers will not be deceived.”¹⁶ Julien, the political atheist, sees the political machinations of his day as the superficial games that they are; when Stendhal places a smile on his lips, he is hinting that Julien sees through the mimesis. He refuses to believe in any type of deeper meaning that others might attach to a turncoat.

To the naive, every conversion—whether political or religious—is genuine. The Stendhalian revelation was his pulling back of the veil on the real dynamics of superficial change through his characters.

Monsieur de Rênal’s “false” conversion, as well as Julien’s reaction to it, is reminiscent of the biblical Judas and the illusion of his outward signs and appearances. When witnessing a woman pouring perfumed oil to anoint Christ’s feet, Judas said the politically correct thing: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”¹⁷ In the very next sentence, he is called a thief by the Gospel writer.

But Judas is more than a thief. He is also a cynic. He would later sell Christ for one-tenth the amount of those three hundred denarii that he suggested giving to the poor. The words that he speaks with his lips, and the signs he communicates with his actions (he kissed Christ as a “sign” of his friendship, which simultaneously signaled his betrayal) are but false signals of a false conversion—of an interior disposition that has, by this point in the story, become that of the Machiavellian political atheist. Like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s story, he does not hesitate to wrap himself in false appearances to accomplish his political aims.

Judas, however, quickly migrates from the Machiavellian to the black-pilled. And this darker type of political atheist rejects not only religious belief and belief in politics, he also ceases to believe in his own ability to act within or upon political structures. Unlike the Machiavellian political atheist who finds a way to survive within the existing structures—maybe even exploit them—the black-pilled political atheist believes that current political systems are thoroughly corrupt and unsalvageable. He believes that the only thing reasonable for a self-respecting person to do is remove oneself from participating in such a system.

The black-pilled political atheist is like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man,” who attempts to opt out of what he finds to be a repressive system.¹⁸ He constructs his own naively anti-mimetic world of autonomy only to find himself ruled by internal mediation, the rivalrous and envious desire to imitate and ultimately supplant the proximate other.¹⁹ He is like the biblical man who believes he has driven out one demon only to find seven more powerful taking over his house.²⁰ As he attempts to assert his free will, the black-pilled political atheist becomes embroiled in mimetic rivalry with—and fulfills the will of—the same authoritarian state that seeks to quiet him.

Judas took the original black pill. He moved from political belief (most likely in Christ as a political liberator) to Machiavellian disbelief (he struck a deal with the state, which he would come to regret) to black-pilled and nihilistic-representing the complete loss of faith, not only in a single political leader or in the state, but even of all hope in the future. As we know, the political evolution of Judas led to his disillusionment, despair, and death.²¹

Now we can turn to the Christian political atheist. Does such a man even exist? And if so, what might he be like?

First, let’s look at some biblical perspectives about the relationship of God to human political affairs. Going back much further than the incarnation of Christ, there is a long biblical tradition that speaks of God looking at human political affairs with amusement, even disdain. In Psalm 2: “The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers band together,” while “The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them.”²² In the first book of Samuel, God gives Israel a king after their rejection of him, but Israel is warned about the mimetic conflict that will follow, and the folly that will result.²³

In contrast to the “worldly prudence” that political actors try to convince the populace they possess, we can read in Christ’s selection of Judas as an apostle an otherworldly orientation. He chose a man that he knew would ultimately betray him to be one of his most intimate collaborators and friends. It is difficult to conceive of a normal politician ever doing this, even if he had some form of supernatural knowledge. Such a politician would be terrified at the thought of a potential traitor in his inner circle.

On the worldly political plane, events unfold in unpredictable ways so long as humans are agents. Because nobody has the power to stamp out human agency entirely (as much as the state may try), we live in a world where the possibility of sin and even betrayal must be permitted. If it were not, we would be attempting to eliminate freedom itself.

To deny the possibility of betrayal (and therefore Judas) is to deny the unique character of the Christian revelation and its apocalyptic dimension. Judas must be allowed to emerge. Attempts to restrain him, stamp him out, or pretend that he does not exist will be the marks of an Antichrist—because the Antichrist, unlike Christ, does not have the power to overcome betrayal, sin, and death.²⁴ The Antichrist can only engage in a cheap mimicry of salvation; he must try to hide or muffle any kind of weakness or scandal. The Antichrist cannot tolerate agency.

In the world of inevitability that Antichrist attempts to construct, there is simply no space for change. There is no room for conversion. Everything follows a predictable pattern. That’s because conversion is dangerous to any leader who isn’t himself converted. Conversion represents a weakening of his own power.²⁵

Part II: The Satanic Principle
and the Girardian Moment

“As human history continues, this satanic mechanism will be subverted more and more.”

René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 2001

Conversion subverts the satanic mechanism. Both Peter and Judas betrayed Christ, but only Peter seems free to change after realizing what he has done. What happened to Peter that didn’t happen to Judas? In the mimetic process, is there a moment in time pregnant with the possibility for change, after which change becomes more difficult?

We may imagine the liminal space between betrayal and conversion. For Peter, the cock crowing three times was the moment of accusation from which he could have fled but to which he instead responded with tears of repentance (he “went outside and wept bitterly,” the Gospel writer Luke tells us).²⁶ For Judas, his liminal moment is when he throws the thirty pieces of silver at the Pharisees’ feet. Their mockery and rejection of him is their accusation.

But unlike Peter, Judas does not respond with tears. Instead, he flees from that terrifying space in which there is time to choose how to respond to the revelation of one’s own villainy.

We may consider the possibility of a “Girardian Moment”—the final moment at which a person still has the freedom to act in such a way that accelerates destructive mimesis or in a way that counteracts it, traveling in a different vector to it.²⁷

Girardian Moment

The moment after which the opportunity to make a fundamental choice has passed, and resisting mimetic contagion becomes far more difficult.

This opens up the debate on the question of free will—a debate that, despite modern tendencies, is to be understood as a theological and not scientific category. I am going to engage the question of free will from the theological perspective and avoid the scientific debates—rooted in a materialist outlook that denies any spirit and, therefore, freedom—about whether free will is, in fact, “a thing.” I am axiomatically presuming free will is a thing; contrary to those who say “Free will is not a thing,” it is very much one—indeed it lies at the foundation of the moral life.

Here I am drawing on an older tradition that has a broader and more expansive understanding of human reason. This tradition sees reason as verifying the truth of things by allowing the world to reveal itself, whereby reason receives and responds to the world as it shows itself. Freedom, then, is integrated with reason as a response to reality in its whole. Freedom and reason need each other. Freedom, then, is won or lost based on how a person responds to past experiences and the choices he makes in response to them.²⁸

In this older (Catholic) tradition, grace and the human will must cooperate. It is the encounter of two freedoms: God’s and man’s. The human subject must willingly accept the gift of grace, and the gift can never be imposed without this cooperation.²⁹ Genuine Christian conversion, while often depicted as an unstoppable process that happens to a person, requires freedom to become complete: an intentional turning away from evil things and inordinate attachments by turning toward the good. That process does not happen all at once; the turning is gradual and often comes with a steep learning curve.

Even in the realm of evil, human freedom must be involved. Just as grace requires human cooperation, so does evil. Theological reflection going back to Augustine’s demonology in De civitate Dei (and long before that, to the trials of Saint Anthony in the desert) depicts demonic forces as unable to possess a person without some prior assent by the one who would become possessed. In other words, the demons cannot possess solely by force. They require an invitation.

This perspective from demonology gives us a new way to think about mimetic power: at a certain point, after a person has given up enough of his freedom and invited these forces in, he loses much, even all, of his remaining power to resist.³⁰ There is some tipping point, some Girardian moment, after which a fundamental choice is no longer possible or is, at the very least, extraordinarily difficult.

But there must be freedom involved. If there is no possibility of freedom in the face of a mimetic mediator, then any culpability for morally evil acts would effectively be destroyed—and we would enter the nihilistic milieu of our own day in which technology companies are seen to possess the power to “control” the entire population.³¹ But even if you do believe that, I ask: is not there a Girardian moment when that was not, or would not be, the case? Have we already passed it?

Girard referred to destructive mimetic powers as satanic and demonic on numerous occasions, but I believe his lack of theological clarity or precision can cause confusion.

In some sense, it seems that Girard demythologized Satan and rendered the structural nature of human self-destruction more intelligible through mimetic theory—but at what cost? Yes, Girard’s demythologizing saves us from the intellectual gymnastics required to accept the imagery of Satan given to us by Dante and Milton. We need only conceive of Satan as a violent mimetic process and not as a red, horned creature with a pitchfork. Yet, the demythologizing tendencies in mimetic theory can easily go too far. Satan is not an all-powerful puppeteer taking advantage of unsuspecting humans; at the same time, Satan is not just a name given for the personification of mimetic violence.³²

If Satan is merely a mimetic process, then the scapegoat mechanism becomes an impersonal “force” through which people may commit violence or self-destruct. This makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to identify or disambiguate any particular person’s moral act or culpability—even the person who cast the first stone (”the demon made me do it!”).³³ The role of human agency is eclipsed, or at least greatly diminished, and Girard’s theory would then represent an entryway into either historicism or determinism rather than being a theory that grapples seriously with the reality of the will.³⁴

Girard’s warning to us about the dynamics of crowds is correct: looking at the person who casts the first stone will often mislead us, because we can tend to lose sight of the larger dynamics at work in a crowd. But Satan is not a “structure”—Satan is an agent who requires willing cooperators. (And if all he needs to do is find the weakest person in a crowd, then his job is easy.)

Satan’s attempt to bring us under his control may be better understood with the distinction between possession and oppression. Alan Jacobs writes:

Those possessed by demons—or to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm—lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it.³⁵

Here Jacobs distinguishes between a person with the capacity to resist, and a person who has already lost that capacity—as a drug addict loses the capacity to say “no” to the next offer of the drug.

Let’s now return to the Satanic principle, but in the context of a crowd. The first-century religious leader Apollonius of Tyana is said to have led a crowd in a stoning of a blind beggar in an amphitheater in Ephesus to rid the community of a disease. In this story, told by Philostratus, Apollonius is the personification of a demonic agent. He did not throw the first stone at the blind beggar; rather, he persuaded some patsy to throw it for him. He misled others with lies.

This allowed him to effect the change he promised to the crowd, but his power was completely reliant on the degree to which the crowd believed him. There was some level of consent to the violent power of the stoning ritual. Apollonius was an agent, and he found a willing agent in the crowd; at a certain point, the mimetic process entered into and surpassed the Girardian moment I have referred to above.

The epistemic transformation that occurred as this mimetic process took hold was symbolized in the transformation of the blind beggar into a demon with fiery eyes.³⁶ Mimesis changes perception. It affects belief. That is why to be a Christian political atheist means, at some level, to reject belief in the sacred power of cheap mimetic processes in which appearances mask substance.

Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his essay “The Dangers of Quietism” from 1935, saw this tendency of formal power to misrepresent its intent and cloak itself in benevolent motives:

In truth, even if Hitler were to burn all the neo-pagan books; even if he were to condemn Rosenberg, Bergmann, and Gebhardt to the same fate as Roehm [whom Hitler had executed]; even if he were to forbid all direct attacks on the Church; even if he were not merely to ratify favorable concordats, but also abide by them—even then, as long as it refused to dissolve and liquidate itself completely, National Socialism would remain every bit as much the Antichrist against which we must fight relentlessly.³⁷

Von Hildebrand is arguing that the demonic never appears as demonic. Rather, it will always appear under the form of the “good.” Because “Satan has fallen from the sky like lightning” (a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and the title of one of Girard’s books), the scapegoat mechanism must take on new forms—it must be a shape-shifter, indeed must never appear to be scapegoating, to be effective.³⁸ Likewise, the Antichrist will not come announcing himself—and neither will his collaborators. Like the political atheist Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel, the Christian political atheist must be able to see beneath appearances.

People who stand in the face of the mimetic process, even while immersed in the environment in which it is brewing, show us that there may indeed be an anti-mimetic option.³⁹ Von Hildebrand, who at one point became Hitler’s number-one intellectual enemy, is an example. While living in the midst of a culture that was swiftly (and mimetically) being seduced by Hitler, he had the courage to resist and speak out at great personal risk to himself and his family. But first he was able to see past the appearances, underneath the mimetic machinations, and grasp the essence of Nazism.

While Girard most often used the term “anti-mimetic” in a disparaging way—to point out the naive postmodern response to mimesis, in which “everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch”⁴⁰—he did refer to anti-mimetic acts, such as forgiveness and mercy. These acts can transcend the logic of destructive mimesis. They have the power to stop and even reverse destructive mimetic processes.

Christ modeled one of these acts in his reversal of the stoning of the adulterous woman.⁴¹ The idea of an anti-mimetic act makes sense only if we rescue it from the horizontal plane of action—from internal mediation—and think of a genuine anti-mimetic act as a free response to a vertical dimension where there is an external mediator of a higher order. The horizontal plane could be thought of as “centripetal,” always turning back on itself and always eventually destructive. The vertical plane is the place where true transcendence may be found—not the false, deviated transcendence that Girard often refers to the scapegoat mechanism as effecting.⁴²

Christianity claims there is indeed a transcendent dimension that extends to us the possibility of being lifted out of mimetic slavery and into the higher logic of charity.⁴³ The Christian idea of agency is deeply bound up with the idea of cooperation: a non-rivalrous cooperation with grace, the opening and response of the will to a receptive, interdependent state of being.⁴⁴ Agency is paradoxically tied to the ability to receive that which is good; it is not merely the ability to give or to do. Real freedom, in other words, requires communion.⁴⁵ The truly anti-mimetic act requires freedom from the mimetic process; mere contrarianism does not. The anti-mimetic act is at once a rejection of the worldly mimesis exemplified by politics and the simultaneous acceptance of heavenly mimesis exemplified by the self-sacrificing love of Christ.

Part III: From Judas to Peter:
Conversion and Innovation

We now return to Girard’s early treatment of Judas to see if we can find some additional insight into the possibility of conversion. He writes:

The jealousy of Judas is ultimately at one with the political attitude of Pilate and the naïve snobbery of Peter, who betrays his master because he is ashamed of his provincial accent in the court of the High Priest. On the surface, motives appear to be individual, and conduct appears to fall into different patterns. But everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis, which works its power on everyone without exception.⁴⁶

It is typical of the early Girard for him to say that “everything comes back in the end to the effect of mimesis” (emphasis mine). Is he saying that people willingly succumb to the seductive power of mimesis, or something else?

Girard does admit that there is a crucial difference between Judas and Peter: “The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas’s inability to come back to Jesus.”⁴⁷ He does not explain the source of this inability, though. Was it demonic possession?

What led to one man’s conversion and another’s despair?

I am proposing here that Judas and Peter had different progressions in their relationship to politics, and thus to Christ. They had different “Girardian Moments” because each man had a different disposition after his betrayal. And this is not an insignificant detail.

By the time the critical moment of potential conversion was available to each, one seemed unable to respond to the grace of conversion, while the other does respond. It is not so much that one had agency and the other did not, but rather that both made a decisive choice at a certain point, a choice which determined how they would relate to the whole of reality. One man (Peter) was open to the grace of conversion. The other refused to cooperate.

But perhaps the respective abilities of each man to respond were affected by the prior political choices they had made, which entailed metaphysical commitments to the whole of reality. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty of black-pilled political atheists in Washington.

Mimesis cannot be fully understood in a snapshot, like a balance sheet, but as a process—especially when that process involves conversion, the process of true metanoia in which a person reverses course. The darkly mimetic forces can have a greater or lesser pull on us depending on the state we’re in when we encounter them, but the process is never too late so long as we’re still alive. The Good Thief on the cross next to Christ is evidence of that.

Peter shows the difference between Judas’s betrayal and his own when he gives his threefold profession of love in the post-Resurrection account of the risen Christ, standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Christ has cooked a fish breakfast for a group of the apostles before taking Peter aside for questioning. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter, three times, to which Peter responds with an affirmative “yes, Lord.”⁴⁸ Peter made a choice. But even prior to this encounter on the shore, Peter had already made a choice.

A death had to occur in Peter to allow him to make this profession of love in the first place, which Judas was incapable of doing. Both men died, but only one man changed.

Girard expresses this difference in his analysis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in the concluding chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, in which he distinguishes between the antithetical deaths of two major characters: “one death which is an extinction of the spirit and one death which is spirit; Stavrogin’s death is only death, Stepan’s death is life.”⁴⁹ Judas’s death is only death; Peter’s death is life.⁵⁰

Part IV: Resurrection
from the Field

In his threefold acclamation of love, Peter acknowledged his guilt and trusted in the one he knew would forgive him. Judas’s despair, on the other hand, saw no reversal. He remained one of the two nihilistic varieties of political atheist to the end. He rejected the lies of the world, but there was no corresponding acceptance on the other side of that rejection. At the very moment when he may have been closest to conversion, he closed himself off to it.

The movement from political belief to political atheism to belief in a transcendent order depends, in large part, on a single primordial belief: belief in one’s own agency, or belief that there is a point at which mimesis may be withstood and even subverted. If this spiritual freedom is denied, a central promise of Christianity must also be denied.

We should look for this freedom even in the Passion narrative. If we do not, we ascribe excessive power to Satan, and to the scapegoat mechanism—a power they do not possess. I do not mean to say the power isn’t real. Jesus’s statements about Satan as a “ruler of this world” demonstrate even a relativized sense of power. (If it’s not real power, then what has Jesus destroyed?) Death has a power—it is the ultimate weapon of the kingdom of Satan. Power is the expression of agency. But it is spiritual agency, freedom in relationship to God, that breaks the mimetic stronghold and power over this world.

If we naively accept the premise of Satan’s power, or if we believe in the absolute inevitability of mimetic violence (as opposed to its relative inevitability), we miss the central point of the Christian revelation: that the best Satan can do is ape God under false appearances.⁵¹

It is true that the political forces that led to Christ’s death have been revealed to be contagious, mimetic violence—a revelation that posits Judas as one traitor among many. But one’s personal disposition in the face of mimesis matters. In the murder of Christ, all are guilty—but the wide variety of individual responses within that universal “all” refutes fatalistic misreadings and reaffirms the role of freedom within the events of the Passion.

This brings us to a central problem: how, then, are we to live in a society of potential Judases?

In nearly everyone’s view, Judas is dangerous—he’s a threat. But he is more than that. He is an agent, not merely a pawn. And unless this false understanding is corrected, we should expect to see more attempts to snuff out agency—and with it, the possibility of conversion.

Near the end of his life, Girard stated at a conference that “Politics can no longer save us.” Politics no longer possesses the sacred power that it once did. It cannot magically produce cathartic social solutions as it once did. And so man must resist the temptation to turn everything into a political matter. Doing so results in various forms of political atheism, often resulting in nihilism, which plagued Judas, and which continue to plague people who fail to grasp the transcendent dimension, or collapse it into the immanent.

The French mystic Charles Péguy lamented that “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”⁵² Every movement begins as a spiritual or mystical force and is subsequently incarnated in concrete action. Péguy continued with a warning: “The interest, the question, the essential is that in each order, in each system, the mysticism not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth.”⁵³

Public life and politics become sterile without mysticism. I believe the Christian political atheist must become, and must remain, a mystic. It’s the remaining, as we have seen in the case of Judas, that is the hard part.

In some cases, the believer must have the “salt water of doubt,” of nihilism, washed into his mouth before he comes to the realization that nihilism is not enough.⁵⁴ But that nihilism must lead to a greater belief.

Hope is the answer to the worst accusations that can be made about a man because it allows him to know that his future will be different than his past or his present. The example of Peter shows that remaining a mystic does not mean that one will never descend into paltry politics or never participate in mimetic violence. No, remaining a mystic means maintaining a commitment to the continual conversion through which a man is able to be a mystic even after he realizes that he is Judas.

Notes

1. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 138. ↩

2. “Cancel Culture,” while I dislike the term, may be the most obvious example. ↩

3. See William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2011). ↩

4. It’s also instructive to look at the use of theological words in technology. See Antonio Spadaro, SJ, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the Internet, trans. Maria Way (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). ↩

5. See Luke Burgis, “The Three City Problem of Modern Life,” Wired, August 2022. ↩

6. The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey raised this point in a 2024 conversation at an Oslo Freedom Forum interview. He stated: “I think the free-speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. And we feel it right now because we are being programmed.” ↩

7. The Apocryphal Arabic Gospel of the Infancy says that Satan possessed Judas even from his birth. Cf. Montague Rhodes James, ed. & trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 80–83. ↩

8. There is a sense of inevitability about any mimetic process that has been put into motion and accelerates past a certain point. The ninth and tenth stones thrown in a ritual stoning are one example. We can rightfully ask, as some have, whether Christ’s prevention (and mimetic reversal) of the stoning of the adulterous woman was something natural—did he merely say the right words to redirect the violent energy of the crowds?—or supernatural. It is fair to ask whether Christ worked a miracle, and whether it was thus grace that broke in and changed the trajectory of normal human affairs. Christ’s intervention in the stoning of the adulterous woman is not classically considered one of his “signs” or “miracles.” ↩

9. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 247. ↩

10. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively about free will, the latter in his refutation of Manichaeism and in his writings against Pelagius. The early Jesuits were challenged in their teaching on free will by the Jansenists, who denied that a human’s free response to grace was required. Likewise the so-called De Auxiliis controversy of the late sixteenth century saw a fierce debate between Jesuits and Dominicans on the subject. Eventually Jansenism was condemned, but both Jesuits, who followed Luis de Molina in emphasizing divine-human synergy, and Dominicans, who followed Domingo Bañez in emphasizing divine providence, received papal approbation. ↩

11. The claims can relate to a specific ruler or political candidate, or to the political order itself. ↩

12. René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, trans. James G. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012). ↩

13. The term “Black Pilled” seems to have originated in the “incel” community, a mostly online group of men who consider themselves unattractive to women and unable to change their position or their fate. I use it here in a more general way to refer to the disillusioned state of a person who loses any belief in their own agency and believes that they are stuck inside of a system they can’t change. ↩

14. For an excellent treatment on Machiavelli in dialogue with Dante, see James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943). ↩

15. Published in 1830, this novel ostensibly treats the issue of monarchism versus liberalism during the Bourbon Restoration following the French Revolution. ↩

16. Girard, Deceit, 132. ↩

17. See John 12:4–6. ↩

18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Classics, 1994). ↩

19. Girard uses “internal mediation” in contrast to “external mediation.” An internal mediator of desire is within the subject’s world; an external mediator is outside of the subject’s immediate world. ↩

20. “Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and dwell there; and the final plight of that man is worse than the first.” (Matthew 12:45). ↩

21. The movement doesn’t necessarily flow in the same order for everyone. ↩

22. Psalm 2:2, 4. ↩

23. “But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us…” 1 Samuel 8. Another text that is relevant here is Augustine of Hippo’s City of God. ↩

24. Scripture seems to indicate the possibility of multiple Antichrists (e.g., 1 John 2:18), not just one as is held in the popular imagination, including structures that could be Antichristic. ↩

25. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John 3:30. ↩

26. Luke 22:62. ↩

27. The person of Franz Jägerstätter comes to mind as a real-life example: he was a lone Austrian peasant who refused to take the soldiers’ oath of allegiance to Hitler, ultimately being executed for insubordination. The recent film A Hidden Life (2019) dramatizes his story. ↩

28. From the classical point of view, drug addiction would be classed as a habitus (hexis), that is, a mode of existence, built up over repeated stimulus and action, that one “has” or “bears” like clothing. Once adopted, a habitus can be changed, but it is quite difficult, requiring more than mental resolve and willpower. See Kent Dunnington, Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice (Westmont: IVP Academic, 2011). ↩

29. “The Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent cooperate with God…” See Michael Maher, “Free Will,” in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), catholic.com/encyclopedia/free-will. ↩

30. It is that the definitive choice—the sin against the Holy Spirit—has finally happened. Macbeth’s dream of being in the middle of a river is a powerful image: it is just as easy to go forward as it is to go back. This is what the Germans call “Grundentscheidung”: the fundamental choice out of which all other actions lie. ↩

31. Whether the power to resist those demonic forces, or to resist evil, is natural or supernatural is beyond the scope of this paper. ↩

32. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (United States: United States Catholic Conference, Inc.—Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), paragraph 395. ↩

33. Demons are classically conceived as immaterial intelligences that primarily work in the realm of thought. A recent Athonite monk compared these thoughts to airplanes circling over an airport: we must take care when considering which planes we will allow to land. ↩

34. Marshall McLuhan, too, was accused of technological determinism for his theory that the “medium is the message,” but this understanding of his work neglects the strong role that agency still played in his understanding of human society. ↩

35. Alan Jacobs, “Something Happened By Us: A Demonology,” The New Atlantis, Spring 2022, thenewatlantis.com. ↩

36. Girard refers to this transformation in his work I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), in the chapter “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.” ↩

37. Dietrich von Hildebrand, “The Danger of Quietism,” in My Battle Against Hitler, trans. & ed. John Henry Crosby and John F. Crosby (New York: Image, 2014), 290. March 10, 1935. ↩

38. Luke 10:18, and the inspiration behind one of Girard’s greatest works, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. ↩

39. By anti-mimetic, I don’t mean free from mimesis. As I explain in my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), I am referring to the possibility of responding to the call of deviated transcendence with real transcendence. ↩

40. Girard, Deceit, 100. ↩

41. John 8:3–11. ↩

42. Girard, Deceit, 61. “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency. There is not one element of this distorted mysticism which does not have its luminous counterpart in Christian truth.” ↩

43. In Christian terms, agape. ↩

44. See Augustine’s discussion of true sacrifice in Book 10 of the City of God. ↩

45. Cf. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Funeral Homily for Msgr. Luigi Giussani,” Communio 31 (Fall 2004): 685–687, communio-icr.com. ↩

46. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

47. Girard, Things Hidden, 247. ↩

48. John 21:15. Christ uses the Greek word agape for “love” in his questioning. ↩

49. Girard, Deceit, 291. ↩

50. “Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies it cannot bear much fruit, but if it dies, it bears fruit a hundredfold.” (John 12:24). ↩

51. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of the relative inevitability of mimetic violence. The Christian Gospel, however, in cooperation and an openness to grace, reveals the power of mimetic violence as relative in the grand scheme, and fundamentally destroyed in the end. The Resurrection both reveals and demonstrates this. ↩

52. “Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.” ↩

53. Cited in Robert Royal, “Everything Begins in Mysticism,” The Catholic Thing, January 23, 2023, thecatholicthing.org. ↩

54. A phrase used by Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010). ↩

Friends:

When I heard the words of Pontius Pilate on Good Friday—”What is truth?”—I couldn’t help but thinking that, while his question remains as important as ever—an equally important and interconnected question is: “What is life?” They help answer one another.

They seem almost so basic as to be not worth tackling—so fundamental that they are like hyperproblems which, because they surround us—and because we live them every second— sometimes seem impossible, overwhelming, to confront. So we try not to think too hard about them. That’s a mistake.

I invite you to dive in deeply with me this summer. The ZOË Conference, which I’m hosting with my colleagues at The Cluny Institute this summer in Napa, CA (July 26-28), will dive deeper into the question of life than any other gathering this year. A fitting year, it seems—the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding—to ask, very simply, what kind of life is possible here?

I am offering a special 25% discount to friends and family—namely, readers of this Substack, along with a free signed copy of my upcoming book The One and the Ninety-Nine. Use the discount code “luke1and99” at checkout for either ticket type to activate the discount.

This offer expires May 26, or whenever we’re sold out—whichever comes first.

Reserve Your Spot

I will personally give you the book and sign it for you when I see you in Napa. (If you’ve already bought a ticket and subscribe to this Substack, don’t worry—I will do that for you too!)

A new addition to the program: to celebrate the launch of the new book on Girard, Be Not Conformed—which emerged from a previous version of this conference—I’ll be hosting a conversation on René Girard in the age of AI with several special guests. Many more updates below.

The Setting

We chose The Meritage because it functions less like a hotel than a retreat. It sits among the Napa vineyards — quiet, walkable, terraces and gardens that make you slow down without trying. Sessions will move between indoor rooms and outdoor spaces. One evening is held in the resort’s wine cave beneath the hillside. Mornings can begin with movement on the grounds or silent meditation in the cave.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to step out of the news cycle and into a slower frame for a few days — among people who are reading, building, and praying seriously — this is it.

Who’s Coming

All ticket holders—both General and VIP—will gain access to a mobile app that contains the full line-up, schedule, and networking features so you can connect with other attendees and speakers, set-up meetings, arrange tours of local wineries with fellow guests, or introduce yourself to the group. Access will be available starting May 26.

Reserve Your Spot

The lineup so far:

• Bryan Johnson — founder of Project Blueprint and Kernel; the man asking whether his is the first generation that won’t die.

• Tao Lin — novelist (Leave Society, Trip), one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American fiction.

• Freya India — author of the book GIRLS® and a popular Substack of the same name.

• Dana Gioia — former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and former California Poet Laureate. He’ll be reading by the fire on the closing evening.

• Catherine Pakaluk — economist and author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, and professor at The Catholic University of America, where she is the Executive Director of The James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology.

• Ruxandra Teslo — Cambridge-trained genomicist leading the Clinical Trial Abundance initiative.

• Ben Klutsey — Executive Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason.

• Jordan Castro — novelist (Muscle Man, The Novelist) and deputy director of The Cluny Institute.

• Victoria Trumbull — Oxford philosopher; her first book, On the Memory of the Soul, comes out from Bloomsbury this October.

• Rebecca Lowe — philosopher of freedom; Senior Research Fellow at Mercatus.

• Fr. Luke Dysinger, OSB — Benedictine monk and Oxford-trained theologian; teaches biomedical ethics at St. John’s Seminary (and was my teacher there years ago)

• Jeff Frank — philosopher of education at St. Lawrence; will lead the closing Foundations of Agency workshop.

Joining them on panels and in conversation: Shadi Hamid, Clay Routledge, Toby Kurth, Thomas Demonchaux, Fr. Mark Roosien, and Fr. Harrison Ayre. A few names and special guests are still to be announced.

I’m glad to have several of my colleagues from CUA joining me, including Catherine Pakaluk, and helping to make this event possible on the opposite coast from our homes.

A few moments to anticipate

• The opening-night screening of Dreyer’s Ordet — his luminous meditation on faith, doubt, and the miraculous.

• A panel asking whether reproduction alone is enough: Catherine Pakaluk, Shadi Hamid, Ruxandra Teslo, and Clay Routledge in conversation.

• A breakout I’ll be leading with Toby Kurth, Rebecca Lowe, and one special guest— Machines, Mimesis, and the Future of Wanting — on desire and agency in the age of AI through the thought of René Girard.

• A Hamilton Society debate on technology and human suffering. Full room, no holds barred.

• Closing drinks with Dana Gioia reading poetry around a fire.

• For VIPs, a dinner in the estate wine cave and breakfast on the vineyard terrace.

Tickets

We’re keeping this small and intentional — closer to a salon than a typical conference.

• General Admission — $795 before discount (limited-time introductory price). Full access to all sessions, the welcome reception, the conference app, and post-event recordings.

• Founder/VIP — $1,995 before discount, limited in number (only a handful left). Everything in GA plus reserved priority seating, the wine cave dinner, vineyard breakfast, and a follow-up salon with speakers and Cluny leadership after the event.

As a reader of this newsletter, you will receive 25% off with code “luke1and99”

Reserve your spot →

Reserve Your Spot

If three days in the Napa hills, with this group of people, sounds like the kind of break you’ve been looking for — I hope you’ll come.

Please write our Events team at admin@cluny.org if we can answer any questions or be of service in any way.

More soon—and thank you, as always, for reading.
Luke

P.S. There’s still one sponsorship slot left at the $10,000 level. You have my assurance that this will be well worth the while of any organization that would like to support ZOË as a partner—not just this summer, but beyond. Please email farren@cluny.org to request a sponsorship package if you’re interested. If that particular level or option doesn’t work for you, we would love to talk about something that does.

P.P.S. I just recorded the audiobook for The One and the Ninety-Nine. It was crazy. The audiobook, like the hardcover, is out June 16—and available for pre-order now.

An excerpt from —her foreword to the new book, Be Not Conformed: René Girard at the Intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis, published earlier this month by CUA Press. The edited volume contains 16 original essays on Girard’s work.

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Foreword: A Good Contagion

Before he became an acknowledged Silicon Valley guru, before he became the fourth wise man in a Nativity crèche, René Girard lived quietly and inconspicuously on a far-flung corner of campus, on the aptly named Frenchman’s Road. I was fortunate to know René before he was a legend, before he was featured in The New York Review of Books, before he was the subject of a documentary film called Things Hidden, before everybody who was anybody knew him, had read him, or had at least read about him and could quote him or pretend to quote him. My personal encounter with him would prove to be one of the more fortunate moments of my life.

How the Girard movement came together is an interesting story, too, the tale of how a small group drawn from the Stanford community prodded the beginnings of a worldwide movement that would eventually fan out from a circle of academics to the world at large.1 A good contagion, if ever there was one.

René Girard never craved the spotlight, although the spotlight found him more than half a century after his first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, was published in 1961. And the light has only become stronger and brighter since his death in 2015. For me, my interest in his ideas was sparked by a one-on-one encounter before I knew much about him.

At that time, articles and interviews with René in the mainstream anglophone press were virtually nonexistent, and René was pretty much an inconnu in the land he had made a home. I combed through interviews and profiles from Le Monde and Le Figaro, but my French was rusty for the task. I cut my teeth on Achever Clausewitz—the title in English was still being wrestled out and the English proofsheets were under review when I first visited his home on French-man’s Road. The winning title: Battling to the End. Music and the mass brought us together.

Decades earlier, I had studied Dante with Stanford Professor John Freccero, a leading Dante scholar, and a close friend of the Girards. That connection led me to the Stanford music professor, William Mahrt; the medieval music in Dante was of interest to both men. A brilliant spiritual, musical, and literary nexus—they’re rarer than we think. The bonus: I eventually met René Girard for the first time, too. He was in a back pew every Sunday at St. Thomas Aquinas Church.

The “Carpenter Gothic” church, more than a century old, was familiar to me; I had appreciated Bill Mahrt’s long and tenacious work directing a Gregorian and polyphonic schola, a liturgical cycle of early music that has continued without break every Sunday and feast day for more than half a century. It was not a political statement in a culture war: it was an aesthetic and spiritual stance, with centuries of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Josquin des Prez, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Orlando di Lasso to back it up, and an uninterrupted chain of Gregorian chant going back to the fourth century.

I would soon learn that René and I were of the same party in liturgy and books. A world of harmony, order, beauty, and discipline. That was his life, but his work wrestled with the worst of what humanity had to offer: violence, scapegoating, and eventually the prospects of nuclear war.

These polyphonic composers were the basis for our first bond, along with the enduring chant of centuries. “When I first attended,” René wrote to me way back in 2002, “I assumed that the Catholic Church and the University actively supported this unique contribution to the spiritual and cultural life of the community. The truth is that ever since 1963, Professor Mahrt has been very much on his own in this enormously time-, talent- and energy-consuming enterprise.”2

That was my first brief, epistolary connection with René. I was writing about early music and chant and had contacted him for comment.3 It was the first note of an unexpected and unequal friendship. He made a debut in one of my books in 2006.4

At Stanford in 2007, we finally met face-to-face after circling around each other for years. I was invited to attend the meetings of a small Girardian group on the edge of the Stanford campus. I don’t recall how I came to be invited or how this particular eclectic group came together. Elective affinities, perhaps. Molecules pulling people together chemically: like to like.

The group had formed sometime in the 1990s. It convened every two weeks at the Gould Center for Conflict Resolution, a gray-and-white building on tree-lined Salvatierra, off Campus Drive behind the law school. Though there were at least twenty names (at one point, fifty) on the email list for the Genesis reading group (more often called “the Colloquium”)—less than dozen or so would be able to get away from workday commitments for the gatherings on the Stanford campus, settling into the well-worn couches and armchairs upholstered in faded browns and grays.

The discussions were an adventure. In March 2008, René shared his interpretation of the biblical Joseph story. It would have been the first time I heard his unusual take on the patriarch, culminating in René’s surprising claim that the account is history’s first recorded instance of true forgiveness. I haven’t been able to prove him wrong.

The group discussed Heraclitus, Pope Benedict’s controversial Regensburg lecture, and John Henry Newman’s idea of the university. Ken Quandt presented a mimetic theory of Plato. A Paris graduate student in political science visited to explore how to bring mimetic theory to his academic work.

Meanwhile, I was quickly put to work. At the April 2008 Imitatio conference, I conducted video interviews with Italian scholar Giuseppe Fornari, Robert Hamerton-Kelly, and others, as well as René himself. Another discussion considered the Girardian aspects of The Wizard of Oz, based on the deceit of desire. There was a strangeness in being swept up by all of this: I was working crazily to finish journalism commitments at night, and carrying out my Stanford humanities work by day, with a deepening connection with René Girard on the side.

Years earlier, someone told the story of Stanford Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy, in Berlin with friends, who was confronted and asked why he had become a “Girardian.” The answer, according to the story: “Because it’s cheaper than psychoanalysis.” He had a point.

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, a brilliant scholar and theologian, dominated the conversations, sometimes to the exclusion of everyone else; a big bold man with a pronounced South African accent, a wise and witty (and sometimes abrasive) one-man show. However, when René softly ventured a few comments, Bob deferred quickly: the courtesy of long friendship. Bob’s sidekick, a former Stanford football player named Wayne Larocque, often attended, as did the Voegelin scholar and Hoover Fellow Paul Caringella, theologian Gil Bailie, Plato scholar Ken Quandt, and Byron Bland, a consultant at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and fellow at Stanford’s Martin Luther King Institute. I would meet more members of the group in the weeks to come.

René also attended regularly—the star, a supporting player, and audience all at once. By then he was in his mid-80s and his energy was already ebbing, eight years before his death. But he was still an inescapable presence, still the reason that we were there. I observed his self-effacement, his modesty—he declined to dominate, even when he could have, even when we wanted him to be the boss. Finally, there was an intense young man of about forty with penetrating, pale blue eyes. He sat on the floor, legs akimbo, wearing running shoes before running shoes were a thing. That, someone whispered to me, is Peter Thiel. So it isn’t too much of a reach to say I studied René Girard with Peter Thiel, though I don’t recall ever exchanging so much as a greeting with the legendary entrepreneur in all my visits to the Gould Center.

Thiel’s interest in René’s thought was not about making money but rather understanding himself and his motives and assessing the times—that would be true of just about everyone who seriously engages with Girard’s ideas. As a young man in a New York law firm, Thiel remembers all the lawyers competing for the same goals. They measured themselves by their progress within their peer group, not any transcendent objective.

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Later, Thiel would focus on global warming and fossil fuels, apocalypse, immortality, and the future of democracy. His thinking followed the profoundly interdisciplinary directions and patterns modeled by René himself, though his preoccupations were of an entirely different hue. René’s theories weren’t fashionable and, in some cases, could be a career-killer. But not for Thiel.

Bologna-based anthropologist Mark Anspach, then an undergraduate at Harvard, wasn’t so fortunate. René Girard had warned him that mimetic theory was a risky career choice. One advisor told him that citing Girard in his senior thesis was “batty.” Anspach recalled the event ruefully: “It wasn’t a criticism of what I was doing; it was criticism of Girard. He said this guy’s ideas are dotty. That word stuck in my mind—you know, ‘dotty.’ It was dotty.” He complained to Harvard about the unfairness, arguing that once the faculty had approved the subject of his thesis, it was out of bounds to criticize him for writing about it. Rather they should critique his work on its merits. Such was Girard’s reception in academia. And for many years, the scholarly exile would continue. Girard’s theories are only beginning to find acceptance in academia, though his entire career was in American universities.

The point: I assumed back then I was entering a well-established circle of old-timers, long familiar with Girard’s work. That wasn’t the case—or at least, not entirely. I realized only much later that I was there at the beginning, not knowing it was a beginning. And everyone else was finding their way, too.

The Gould Center fostered a colloquium of Girardian novices at various stages of initiation. Everyone was learning and is still learning. The arc extends beyond our lifetimes, which puts a different scale on the notion of “beginning.” Almost all of us were new, or relatively new, to Girard’s thought—with the obvious exception of Robert Hamerton-Kelly, who met René in 1981. Though he was theoretically one among equals, his longstanding friendship with René and his clout at Stanford brought the colloquium into being. He was dean of the chapel at Stanford and also one of the cofounders of the Colloquium on Violence

Hamerton-Kelly usually offered an article or paper for the discussion at the Gould Center. Others did, too. I remember, in particular, English Professor Bernadette Waterman Ward of the University of Dallas presenting a paper on Adam Bede and mimetic angels in George Eliot’s novels.6 Women were still something of a novelty in the group then—so her appearance was cheering and so was the discussion around her paper. I recall an Imitatio workshop on neuroscience, a discussion of the Regensburg lecture, a visit from a PhD candidate in political science from Paris who was using mimetic theory in his research, and a large, splashy lunch at the tony Il Fornaio restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, with San Francisco Archbishop George Niederauer as a guest of honor. That was Bob Hamerton-Kelly’s style and influence.

How was this conclave different from the other, more academic or corporate models of organization that were already coalescing around Girard? It was not a society, not an association, but rather a colloquium: that is, focused academic discussions with an in-depth consideration of René’s work. Professional societies also began to form, along with academic sessions where formal papers were given—but the growing Girardian movement hadn’t yet reached the worldwide audiences most in need of Girard’s message of reconciliation, forgiveness, and the utter abandonment of violence and retaliation. Girard was unequivocal and yet ambiguous: “The time has come for us to forgive one another. If we wait any longer there will not be time enough.”7 Time enough . . . for ourselves, for the world? Time enough to escape the apocalypse we’re preparing for ourselves? René left the possibilities open for good reason. Each one of us faces our own apocalypse, our own personal mortality. Perhaps we focus on big worldwide cataclysms to avoid coming to terms with it.

In those years, Imitatio was just beginning to sponsor research to pro-mulgate René’s concepts and legacy. Few of us anticipated that we would be recipients of its largesse. We were drawn to René’s work because it spoke to us, and to the world.

Elaborating and applying Girard’s concepts can’t be entirely a solo operation, a “head trip.” Hence organizations like the Colloquium on Violence & Religion. His concepts must be enacted in community, in concert with others. After all, it’s a social theory, not a self-help scheme, though all of us have found applications to our own lives. We are the experiments. We are the guinea pigs.

No one came to the Gould Center because it was the smart and up-to-date thing to do. Rather, like Peter Thiel and his running shoes—he wore them because it was the most convenient way to get to Salvatierra Street, not because he was trying to impress us with his savoir faire and nonchalance in a room of older academics. If it was cool, maybe it was because he seemed cool and unknown. Not a fashion statement, but his way of being true to himself and the world. He was onto something—and we sensed it was valid.

Mimetic independence creates a mimetic reaction from the people around us—but it is a good contagion. René was a model for many of us: we wanted to be like that guy; we wanted to understand what he understood. He had something to say that’s compelling. We were motivated by what, years later, Luke Burgis would call a “thick desire.” The thickest possible.

And that was the point: we were not just talking about breaking away from mimetic desire. We were demonstrating how to do it.

Inevitably, friction sparked among the players—people are prone to conflict, after all—but also a surprising joy and relief. It was the beginning of a growing movement. Nobody was in it for getting rich or getting tenure. Some lost social standing and prestige for taking up with an unconventional Frenchman, others dropped out of grad school. In Paris, Benoît Chantre lost his job as a publisher. Others switched their careers, or their college majors, or moved across the country or world. “You had a sense of a bunch of losers, but it was a lot of fun,” Trevor Merrill recalled. He compared it to one of those science fiction stories where people with no apparent affinities hear an unusual summons to gather, forming a disparate group of oddly assorted people with an all-encompassing mission.

In short, the reasons for being there were not mimetic. We were not driven by what the cool kids were doing. To the contrary, you had to abandon the cool kids to get in the space where you could understand what René was driving

No one was making a buck off this. There were no books pouring out of publishing houses, no seminars, no conferences. No one was interpreting Girard’s work because we were still learning his work. No one was getting tenure or doctorates or prizes because of mimetic theory. Podcasts and talking-head Zoom videos did not exist. Girard wasn’t yet in a New York Times crossword puzzle or mentioned on White Lotus—that was in a future he didn’t live to see. What he offered instead was the truth of humanity’s condition, the reason for our inhumanity, and a way out of madness.

The measure of success happens within the heart of each person. The theory has succeeded when we halt before an envious or snide remark, when we decline to join in a vindictive and personal attack on a rival, or when we resist the temptation to pour invective on a figure only seen on social media.

Here’s the kicker: I can’t remember a single word anyone said at any of those hours and hours of meetings decades ago.

What was happening in the room was more important than what was being said inside it. Words disappear with time, but the lessons linger. Consider: one of the wisest men in the world sat to the side, silent and humble. One of the richest men in the world sat on the floor.

And Robert Hamerton-Kelly—I remember his soliloquies as he talked wisely, wittily, not even stopping to inhale. Talking so long that people were no longer listening but merely waiting. And just when you were sure he couldn’t be more pompous if he tried . . ., he paused. His face crumpled in embarrassment as he began merrily laughing at himself, in front of the whole group. He was onto Bob Hamerton-Kelly. The unexpected self-recognition and disconcerting humility were worth the price of admission. That’s what I remember. Not the words, but the laugh. It taught me more than a bucketload of words.

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The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.

The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.

So much of this discourse, though, remains at the level of ideas and taste, and not at the level where it is most insidious: our moral convictions, our conscience.

I sat down with Maddy Kearns, a journalist for the , last week for a couple of drinks and a chat about my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. (You can read the full interview here, if you’re interested). We covered a lot of ground over the course of two hours, but the one word that came up the most in our conversation—and to which I keep coming back again and again—is the word conscience.

While Pope Leo XIV doesn’t explicitly use the word in his tweet from this past week, he does capture far more eloquently and with more spiritual depth and authority than I could the cultural diagnosis that has been keeping me awake at night and driven the work I’ve been doing on the book for the past two years.

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How do we encounter truth that transcends the crowd? Or does our ‘truth’ always happen to be the truth of the crowd that we are most closely aligned with at any given time? I think all of us hope not—but we look at the world, and we see a ‘false conscience’, or what is commonly a hive conscience, prompting people to draw moral conclusions that always just happen to line up perfectly with the decisions they’ve already made. And that seems especially thin when it comes to political decisions and loyalties, like the Vice President’s suggestion that the Pope “be careful” when talking about matters of theology after it became apparent that there was friction between the administration and the Pope’s recent statements regarding war, care for immigrants, and general matters of morality. The Pope’s office involves teaching—but not merely in the way that our middle school teachers taught us math. His office involves forming the conscience, our sense of what is right and wrong.

The hive conscience doesn’t start with 'is this true?’ or ‘what must I do?’. It starts with something base: ‘which team will my words and actions put me on?’ How will my stance on this issue align me with certain groups or interests? And that primary reference to groups, interests, power, and community is precisely where things can begin to go off the rails.

As far as I know, the Pope is not seeking to enter or win any future elections. His relationship to the truth has not been distorted by power. His words are calling many people back to a primordial sense that many have lost, partly due to the media and technology cocktail that has scrambled both intuitions and even our very senses.

Conscience is emphatically not the voice of subjective conviction—the mere feeling that one is in the right. That reductive modern view is precisely what allows people to commit grave evils with perfectly "clear consciences," mistaking the comfort of their own certainty for a genuine moral summons. The older and deeper sense of conscience is rooted in what the tradition calls anamnesis: a primordial memory of the good, inscribed into our nature, which resonates when it encounters truth. Conscience in this sense is not something we construct out of our preferences and feelings; it is something we uncover, and it stands in judgment over us precisely because it points to a truth that exceeds us. The everyday act of moral judgment—what the tradition calls conscientia—is only as trustworthy as the formation of the anamnesis beneath it.1

The connection between memory and conscience has been one of the great revelations of the past two years for me. In the interludes between the chapters of The One and the Ninety-Nine, I tell part of the story of my relationship with my dad, who was diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer's disease as I was beginning the book. Through his illness, and through my care for him, I found myself called back to a deeper conscience, something almost primordial within me. This surprised me. My father did not appear in the original proposal I sent to St. Martin's Press, but he emerged in the writing of the first chapter and never left. His memory, which is bound up with mine, carried moral consequences I did not yet understand when I began writing.

The conscience is how we safeguard ourselves from the tyranny of our own age, or the corruption of the communities we inhabit. John Henry Newman grasped this when he raised his famous toast "to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards"—not as a declaration of private judgment against authority, but as a confession that conscience is binding precisely because it is the voice of a truth higher than the self, a truth to which even the Pope must answer. Such a conscience is never formed in isolation. It is awakened, tutored, and corrected within a living tradition—scripture, liturgy, the witness of the saints, the slow pedagogy of a community that hands down what it has received. But even communities can become corrupted, at which point their fate rests on the extraordinary witness of those who are still able to sense and respond to a truth which transcends the populism of its members.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: people telling others that they have a ‘moral responsibility’ to do something, as if one person’s moral imagination could substitute for another’s conscience.

Last week I tweeted that I had received an invitation from the AI company Anthropic to participate in a couple of days of working sessions at their San Francisco headquarters with other Christian leaders to help talk about their model Claude’s new constitution.

There were various red flags in my initial communication. Anthropic had raised over $30 billion the previous month, but the invitation reached me in the register of a non-profit or church appealing to volunteers' "time, treasure, and talent" for a kind of spiritual mission. The tone was too odd for me. I decided to sit it out, since something didn’t sit right with me about it. (Not to mention it would’ve required a huge sacrifice for my family, with me being away from my newborn and her sister for several days while I was technically on paternity leave—something the company thought was a sacrifice I should gladly make in order to help them.)

When I shared my decision publicly, many understood—but I was still shocked at the number of people, mostly fellow Christians, who implied or even said explicitly that I had a moral responsibility to show up when invited to things like that. Says who? I have a moral responsibility for many things, but I am confident that Anthropic’s invitation is not one of them. This was a prime example of the “hive conscience” at work: a notion of the conscience that is not personal, but collective: “because we are X, we must do Y.” In this case, X is Christian and Y is “be at the table”.

The conscience is the faculty by which we learn to say “I” with moral conviction. It is a step deeper than the comfort of “we believe” statements—it is how we fully own responsibility for what we think and believe, even if others do too: without the coercion and conformity that they want or expect from us. Sometimes, the people doing the coercing are the ones closest to you: your own family, friends, party, colleagues. Usually, they won’t be so explicit about it. The coercion will come in the form of a thousand nudges in the back with the thumb or forefinger, and those who aren’t paying attention may not even notice.

You will notice that the Apostles and Nicene creeds do not begin “We believe”, but “I believe”. And I’d like to suggest that getting to a genuine “I” is the work of a lifetime, but it’s the work that each of us must do—because that same tension plays out in nearly every aspect of our lives, in which we are asked to sacrifice our real conscience to the hive one.

And when you do exercise it, it may not be respected. And that’s okay—do it anyway.

The only tables you are really welcome at are the ones where you can get up and leave freely, and where the invitation doesn't come as an offer we can't refuse.

We can’t learn to respect the freedom of others until we first learn to respect our own: a freedom oriented toward truth over tribe, and one which finds its fulfillment in genuine communion with others who have learned the cost of freedom.

I am not going to suggest that loneliness is a necessary consequence of integrity and truth in today's world, but I will say this—if you feel lonely, do not assume that something is wrong with you; in fact, your desire for a form of real communion that you have not yet been able to achieve may be the very fire that you are called to keep kindled.

If you enjoyed this essay, would you pre-order your copy of The One and the Ninety-Nine today?

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In recent years, I’ve noticed a huge increase in the use of the word energy to describe how people feel. This person had good energy about them. The event had amazing energy. People join a movement because it seems to have energy. All of those are relatively straight-forward. I love live music, and that’s largely because I love the energy in the crowd—an energy that doesn’t come through my home speakers. But one area where I have heard the word over and over, to the extent that it has caught my attention, is that ideas have energy.

Oddly, though, the ideas that seem to have the most energy are the ones that seem most dangerous. Not Christian Orthodoxy, but heterodoxy—or at least if not obviously heterodox, ideas pushing the boundaries, operating slightly outside of the Overton Window (witness the energy surrounding Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures, for instance). Notice the energy around Nick Fuentes and what used to be fringe political movements. Energy is now in edginess. Or the energy in tech: it is gravitating toward things that seem powerful and dangerous, like autonomous weapons systems and defense tech, and not necessarily to the more unsexy things like, say, a cure for Alzheimer’s. War is much more energizing to the young.

I don’t deny the notion that it has always been like this to some extent. History is filled with those who have pushed boundaries and sought the most energizing pathways forward. Nietzsche gave us all a philosophy and language to describe the impulse, and the world has never been quite the same. Once we stepped back and did the meta-analysis of attraction, then attraction itself became corrupted. We may begin to think that if we want something that seems pedestrian—I don’t know, like a family with children and a messy household—that we are somehow not wanting powerfully enough.

All of this has to do with the most fundamental topic of what is life—which is, as many of you know, the very theme of the annual Cluny Conference that I am hosting in Napa this July (tickets still available!). And one of the most fascinating distinctions of “what life is” is between bios and zoë, a distinction which itself is the subject of debate. One of the leading thinkers who has made this distinction central to his philosophy is the Italian Giorgio Agamben, for whom zoë represents “base” life—the simple fact of being alive. It is life that has not yet taken form. It is bare, vulnerable, stripped of everything that would give it real vitality, like political form and particular structures like participation in communities. These things turn it into bios and give life vitality—or we may even say a kind of energy. It becomes meaningful.

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Agamben’s masterstroke is his argument that modern politics increasingly collapses the distinction between zoë and bios while pretending to maintain it. Sovereign power decides who is a bios (a life that matters) and who is reduced to zoë (bare existence, a life that doesn’t matter). The person reduced to this form of zoë becomes a homo sacer, in Agamben’s language: a person who can be killed, because they lie outside of the system, but a person who is still recognized as having a base form of biological life.

For Agamben, the concentration camp represented modernity’s distinction between bios and zoë: pure death without—at least in the minds of those committing the murders—the character of sacrifice.

Using Agamben's framework, we can begin to see why debates like abortion are so intractable. The disagreement is not only moral but ontological. It turns on whether the life in the womb is understood as bios—a life with form and meaning—or as mere zoē, biological existence without that form, or as something that has not yet crossed the threshold into either category and thus is not a life at all. Most people have never articulated their position in these terms, but their intuitions already presuppose one of these views. The conflict, then, is not just about rights or policy, but about what counts as a life at all.

I hope the difference is becoming clear, because now I’m going to turn it on its head. We’re going to get back to energy—but first, the inversion.

A Different Kind of zoë

Agamben equates bios with life that has form—a life that is part of a city or state, for example. It acquires a new kind of vitality—we might even say energy—from this participation.

What turned this basic distinction on its head were the Christian gospels, especially the Gospel of John, in which Jesus uses the word zoë to refer to a specific kind of new life:

“I came that they may have life (zoē), and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life (zoē).” (John 14:6)

“I am the resurrection and the life (zoē); whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” (John 11:25)

“Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life (zoē aiōnios*). He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” (John 5:24)

“I am the bread of life (zoē); whoever comes to me shall not hunger.” (John 6:35)

Here zoë refers to a higher form of life that transcends city or state and is not dependent on them. It is a more abundant form of life in Christ that is within anyone’s reach, regardless of the circumstances or political forms of life that they find themselves in.

Agamben exposes the fragility of political dignity. The Gospel asserts the indestructibility of personal dignity.

The Gospels almost completely flip the earlier hierarchy: zoē becomes the highest form of life, because it means participation in the divine life. It is capable of eternity. Bios is not.

In Christianity, “form of life” began to take on new shapes that did not inherently have political character: for instance, the form of chastity (even celibacy), poverty, and obedience, as in the monastic traditions—something which, interestingly, the post-secular Agamben turned to in fascination in his later work. The very concept of “abundance” could now be conceived of in different terms than the merely material.

This doesn’t mean that there is no relationship between bios and zoē in the spiritual life; it does mean that bios is now oriented to zoē, though, and these new forms and structures should only be sought to the extent that they make this zoē more accessible, and attractive.

Jean Danielou began to describe this relationship in his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, originally published in 1965. In it, he describes the structure of politics like a lever that can either open or close people off to transcendent realities to varying degrees. He wasn’t just talking about the number of times an NFL football player says “First of all, all thanks to God” before he makes his post-game comments, or any of these performative or mimetic things which are hard to draw any serious correlation from. I think he was, at root, writing about the ways in which our environments direct our energy and ambition.

It’s incredibly hard to change the shape of desire for a single person, and it’s even harder for an entire company or community or nation. But one thing I’ve learned, having been helping people and organizations do this for the past 5 years, is that there is a singularly strong connection between energy—the things that make people feel truly alive—and desire. To ignore that connection would be to Platonize desire in some sense, to abstract it from its bodily form. Desire is something intimately bound up with the body. Not just sexual desire, but all desire.

That is why I believe that in the next decade, with the ascendency of disincarnate AI, the body will become paradoxically more important to those who truly understand. Enfleshed and ensouled desire will have primacy over the artificial desires of machines, if we could call those desires at all. (I don’t.)

Which brings me back to the fundamental question of what is energizing people right now. One thread that is undeniable is the desire to transcend all systems, or to overturn them, to become solo entrepreneurs and build billion dollar companies, to exist outside of any boundaries—in essence, to live the life of Agamben’s homo sacer, a life of zoē. But this new thirst for zoē is also Christ haunted, tinged with the Christianity it can’t escape, because it promises a form of salvation. My OpenClaw AI, set up here in my attic office, will save me from the coming economic disruption. It’s titillating to think of all the things we’ll do together, me and my Claw.

But this is clearly a kind of luxury desire—the kind of desire I have because I can afford to have it, and because my pursuing that desire doesn’t immediately affect anyone else negatively. It might take some time away from my family in the short-term, but most people won’t notice or have any idea of how I am directing my time and energy until, in some cases, years later. A great tragedy of our society is that any of us could be chasing thin, ephemeral desires for years without anyone stopping us or making us question ourselves.

We go searching the world over, in René Girard’s words, searching for the thing we want, believing that it must lie beneath the only rock on earth that is too heavy for us to lift. But the truth is not a rock, nor something that can live under a rock, nor something that is reducible to a “fact” or “object” that we will ever find.

We are living in a moment in which people are chasing energy as if it were life itself.

But energy is cheap. It can be manufactured, amplified, engineered. Entire industries now exist to produce it—political movements, media ecosystems, even technologies that promise to make us feel more alive while quietly detaching us from the conditions that make life possible.

This is why the most “energizing” ideas today so often feel dangerous. They are. Not always because of what they propose, but because of what they train us to seek: intensity without depth, stimulation without form, freedom without relation. A kind of life that looks, in the end, very much like Agamben’s zoē—exposed, unprotected, and endlessly manipulable.

The Gospel offers a different vision. It does not deny energy, but it refuses to confuse it with life. The life it speaks of—zoē—is not the life that burns hottest, but the life that cannot be extinguished. It does not depend on the system, or the crowd, or the next idea that feels electric.

And that is why it is so easy to overlook. Because in a world addicted to energy, real life often appears, at first glance, almost quiet.

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Almost two and a half years after the NOVITĀTE conference in D.C. (which celebrated René Girard’s 100th birthday), the book that I promised would emerge from that gathering is finally about to be published. There is much more on the book below—including a detailed table of contents of the 17 original essays that make it up, as well as a bonus preview of the Introduction.

I’m also excited to announce that we are going to be bringing back the spirit of NOVITĀTE with a special session dedicated to Girard and A.I. at the upcoming Zoe conference in Napa this summer, where you can expect to see a lot of the same faces from the 2023 conference—and a lot of new ones.

But before I get to the book: For the next 7 days, the second cohort of the Foundations of Agency workshop is open this spring at a cost of $495.

This is not simply a course that takes you on a survey of the philosophical, psychological, and theological foundations of the concept of agency—it will put you in a small cohort of 4-5 other professionals and act as a forcing function for doing something important that you know you need to do, or will figure out during the course of the 40-day workshop. And it will help you exercise the agency to do it.

I hope to see many of you there. The next seven days are your last chance to apply and enroll.

Be Not Conformed—Advance Reader Edition of the Introduction

Be Not Conformed is out April 10 from Catholic University of America Press and available for pre-order now from CUA Press and most places books are sold.

I’m excited to share with you below my Introduction to the edited volume of essays, along with the Table of Contents so you can see the array of thinkers and writers who make up this volume. I have permission from CUA Press to publish my Introduction here. For the rest, you will need to buy the book.

Here is why you should: While there are many fascinating essays that make it up, and some innovations—including Girard being brought into serious contact with Marshall McLuhan, von Hildebrand, and Liugi Giussani for the very first time, not to mention some apocalyptic (and antichristic! provocations)—it is fundamentally a book that is meant to transform you.

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Introduction, by Luke Burgis

The origin of this book is a conference I hosted at The Catholic University of America on November 3, 2023. That gathering, called NOVITĀTE: René Girard at 100, was one of several major events worldwide that celebrated the one hundredth year since the birth of René Girard on Christmas Day 1923. The conference title was inspired by the Vulgate wording of Romans 12:2—“reformamini in novitate sensus vestri” (“be transformed by the renewal of your mind”)—signaling its call to intellectual and spiritual renewal in Girard’s centenary year.1

I began planning about a year early. And then, relatively late in the process—nearly halfway in—I was forced to move the event from its original mid-October date due to joyous but unforeseen circumstances: my wife and I learned that we were expecting our first baby the very same week as the conference. Wanting to avoid the anxiety of hosting an event the same week as the birth, I moved it to the only other date that the banquet venue had available for the entire fall season: November 3.2 Still too close for comfort, but at least not a direct overlap.

After making the change, a friend reminded me that René Girard had died on November 4, 2015; the forced move had resulted in a conference that coincided with the anniversary of Girard’s death. We organized a Requiem Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in downtown Washington the morning after the main event. A surprising number of conference participants, Christian and non-Christian alike, attended.

After the high intellectual pitch of the previous day’s talks and panels, and a boisterous party that evening, the mass brought our conference to its conclusion with sacred solemnity. I walked home afterward reflecting on the idea that, for all the grandeur of Girard’s theory, it may have found its highest expression in that liturgy: people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, heads bowed, asking for forgiveness.

Two of the keynote speakers were entrepreneur Peter Thiel, Girard’s famous former student, and Father Elias Carr, a Canon Regular of Saint Augustine from the abbey of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria. The day featured a panel on race and mimesis with Coleman Hughes, Hollis Robbins, Lester Spence, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, and another on mimesis and media with Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie, author Walter Kirn, and Renée DiResta, moderated by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. More than sixteen separate panels and presentations took place in concurrent sessions—everything from a Girardian critique of ideology (Geoff Schullenberger) to the Eschatological Problem of Technology (Jon Askonas) to conversations bringing Girard’s ideas into generative contact with Marshall McLuhan, Luigi Giussani, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.

One of the fruits of the conference is the book that you are holding in your hands. We selected and developed many of the essays presented at the conference, and solicited several additional essays related to its theme, to form a cohesive whole. The collection is meant to serve a dual purpose: to reflect on what Girard achieved in the past one hundred years, and to speculate about the potential contribution of his work to the next hundred.

The subtitle of this volume is René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. Few thinkers of the past century were as multidisciplinary as René Girard. He was a silo-busting figure whose singular, dense insight of mimetic desire blossomed into a rich field of study that spanned the philosophical, anthropological, theological, economic, literary, and more. Girard wrote a book on Shakespeare; a book about Job; another about the apocalypse. He wrote essays about business and innovation, and some of his mentees were renowned entrepreneurs and investors.

Girard was a world-renowned academic, elected to the Académie Française in 2005. He was also deeply Catholic. And, being based at Stanford, his ideas influenced Silicon Valley indirectly perhaps more than any other thinker of his time, through his proteges. When the history of the twenty-first-century Silicon Valley is written, he will have a place in it. Girard is at the nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley (which stand for reason, religion, and innovation) because he probed anthropological truths in a way that connects them. That is rare in today’s fractured and fragmented world.

Inspired by Girard’s example and by the integrating force of his ideas, the conference in November 2023 led not only to the publication of this book, but also to the formation of the Cluny Institute in 2024, a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to connecting the “three cities” to build a future that is as meaningful as it is prosperous.3 Girard is one of its intellectual fathers and will continue to shape its evolution.

You will find a diverse array of essays in this volume of different style, substance, and form—some from Girard scholars, and others from writers who are relatively new to his work. That diversity was intentional, and key to the conference’s spirit; however, it may feel jarring if you’re expecting consistency. At the conclusion of NOVITĀTE, someone described it as a mix between a Parisian salon, a party, and a traditional academic conference, without regard to rank or title. I think that’s something Girard himself would have appreciated. There were professors encountering priests and technology entrepreneurs in conversation with novelists. The intention was to bring the greatest energy possible to Girard’s work and let the chips fall where they may. “Be Not Conformed” wasn’t just the theme of the conference, it was the form of the conference—something non-conforming—and the form of this book, too.

On one hand, we all strive to differentiate ourselves; we instinctively want to set ourselves apart, to not conform, especially when we feel our sense of identity under assault. And yet, on the other hand, we can’t entirely escape mimesis. We must ultimately conform our lives to something.

The way out of this conundrum, you will see in this book, starts with understanding that there are different kinds of conformity. The Czech theologian, Josef Zvěřina, a survivor of totalitarianism, saw that it is conformity to the world that leads to negative mimesis—to rivalry, and eventually to violence. In his commentary on the scripture passage from Romans 12:2 (“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”), he notes that the Greek word Paul uses for “form” has the root schema. “In a nutshell,” Zvěřina writes, “all schemas, all exterior models are empty. We have to want more.”

When Paul exhorts the Romans to be “transformed,” Zvěřina notes, he uses the word metamorphosis. “He opposes schêma or morphé—permanent form, to metamorphé—change in the creature. A person is not to change according to any model that in any case is always out of fashion, but it is a total newness with all its wealth.”

External models are easy to cling to, but true metamorphosis is a dynamic change from within the creature—and there are not always clear signposts.

And so, this book is not an argument, it’s an invitation: to step outside the ready-made forms of thought, to risk that kind of transformation.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Luke Burgis

Foreword: A Good Contagion

Cynthia L. Haven, National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar

Part One: Athens

1. Mimesis and Thumos: A Synthesis of Girardian and Platonic-Scholastic Psychology

Mark Shiffman, Saint Patrick’s Seminary and founding director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics

2. To What Do We Conform? René Girard, Black Studies, and Ayn Rand

Hollis Robbins, Professor of English at the University of Utah ()

3. Deceit, Desire, and the Contemporary Novelist

A. Natasha Joukovsky, novelist

4. Girard and the Fictional Self

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author, Lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford

5. Aeneas as Founding Murderer: A Girardian Investigation of the Aeneid’s Close

Annika Nordquist McGregor, OpenAI

Part Two: Jerusalem

6. Escaping the Mimetic Whirlpool: Deceit, Desire, and the Catholic Imagination

Michael P. Murphy, Director, Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage and Senior Lecturer at Loyola University Chicago

7. The Analogical Antidote

Trevor Cribben Merrill, California Institute of Technology and author ()

8. Rulers of the World or Triumph of the Cross? René Girard and Dietrich von Hildebrand on: Anthropology, Liturgy, and Resisting Contagion

Michael Matheson Miller, Acton Institute Chief of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Research Fellow

9. Beyond Deceit: Girard and Giussani on the Meaning of Desire

Thomas Deutsch, Theology Teacher at Connelly School of the Holy Child

10. Media and Mimesis: From Imitation to Immolation

Andrew McLuhan, poet, educator, researcher, and founder of The McLuhan Institute ()

11. “We Lepers”: The Mimetic Saint According to Gavan Daws’s Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai

Fr. Elias Carr, Canon Regular of Saint Augustine of Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria

Part Three: Silicon Valley

12. “Things Hidden”: Mimesis, Technology, and the Apocalypse

Tobias Huber, writer
Byrne Hobart, writer, entrepreneur, investor, and consultant

13. Waiting for Girard: Rivalry, Apocalypse, and Return

Owen Yingling, student at the University of Chicago

14. Against the City of Noise

Justin Lee, First Things Associate Editor

15. The Illusions of Novelty: Belle Delphine and the Eternal Return of Online Fame

Katherine Dee, writer and podcaster ()

16. The Medium is the Mimesis: McLuhan, Girard, and the Technologies of Imitation

Brett Robinson, Associate Director for Outreach and Associate Professor of Practice at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame

17. From the Passion to the Hydrogen Bomb: René Girard and the Eschatological Problem of Technology

Jon Askonas, Assistant Professor at The Catholic University of America

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It’s not hard to find your tribe. The real challenge today is not losing yourself within one.

For the past three years, I’ve been researching and writing the most important and personal thing that I have ever published: THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion, out from St. Martin’s Press on June 16, 2026.

For those who know me or have followed my work, please consider stopping now to click this link and pre-order. For the rest: let me tell you why I believe this book is worth the investment—and why I think it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Some Backstory

In 2021, when my mother unexpectedly died, I became the primary caregiver for my father, who was battling advanced Alzheimer’s disease—only a few months after my book Wanting was published, and just weeks after I was newly married. That experience forced both …

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Friends,

First, some big personal news: the reason I haven’t been as active here lately as I was hoping is that our second daughter was born a little earlier than expected (shortly after Christmas), and nothing has brought me more joy than having two baby girls, one on each shoulder, grabbing each other’s faces and mine—but it’s also been a period of major adjustment and pure exhaustion.

Within 48 hours of my daughter being born, I received a round of last-minute edits on my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine (publishing contracts and schedules are unforgiving!)—so when I was up from 2-4 a.m. putting my toddler back to sleep, I was making edits on the manuscript before I went back to bed rather than writing here.

All that is to say: thank you for your patience with me. Life is rich, even when it’s exhausting—and probably especially when it’s exhausting.

I’ll have much more to say on the book here in the next few months. It’s the most important (and personal) …

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Last chance for discounted Cluny Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) tickets—15% off good through the end of year with coupon code ‘antimimetic’. Full-time position now open: Manager, Social Media and Community.

Moths evolved to navigate by celestial light. Artificial light hijacks that instinct—and they spiral. Technology introduced changes into the environment that they can’t adapt to fast enough.

While none of us like being compared to moths, it’s hard not to see our current predicament as somewhat similar. We’re not adapting fast enough—morally, spiritually, intellectually, physically—to the bright, artificial light that is Artificial Intelligence.

The Internet ushered in the Information Age, in which people quickly became exposed to an abundan…

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Before we get to this week’s essay, two important notes:

1) Tickets to the ZOE Conference in July—where Silicon Valley will come face to face with Athens and Jerusalem, and —are available at a discount, until the end of the year. Apply coupon code ‘antimimetic’ before Jan. 1 at checkout. You’ll be invited onto our conference app to get to know others, set-up meetings, and chat beginning in April.

2) I’m hiring a Director of Operations & Strategy for The Cluny Project in Washington, DC. It’s an in-person job only. We will pay up to $100k with generous benefits for an experienced candidate. Filling this position is my top priority. Applications can be found here. (Other open roles, including Director of Communications, can be found here, but our timeline is longer on filling them.)

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Dear Readers:

I was up until midnight last night (yes, on Thanksgiving) turning around copy-editing queries and fact-checks for my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. Some of the fact-checks were painful, like the time I remembered going back to my basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, on the N train, and feeling a certain way as it “rumbled over the Queensboro bridge” (“The N train doesn’t go over the Queensboro bridge,” my lifelong New Yorker fact-checker reminded me bluntly).

I’ve poured both my mind and my heart into this one, and I hope you enjoy it when it hits shelves next year: June 16, 2026. I’ll be publishing a lot more here related to its central themes in the coming months. Until then, some news:

I’m Hiring!

I’m hiring for several different positions. The one I am expediting, though, and the one with the broadest reach—because the position can be totally remote, and it’s part-time—is Content Strategist. It’s a position that requires: 1) being intimately familiar with …

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In August, I sat down with one of my favorite thinkers, the economist , in my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI. The last time Tyler had been to Grand Rapids was 1982—the year after I was born. So I was greatly amused to hear his commentary on how the city had changed since his last visit, while I was still in a bassinet.

We made our way to an intimate concert venue with outstanding acoustics, where a jazz band played for our gathering of about 100 people during our Cluny Encounter, which I like to describe as mash-ups between unlikely collaborators around a topic that is not too well-grooved, where we can carve fresh snow and challenge assumptions at the intersection of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. The topic that we sat down to discuss on this day in August: The development of talent networks and the role of apprenticeship in a changing world.

Tyler and Daniel Gross wrote an excellent book on talent, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, which helped frame our discussion and has influenced the way I think about talent and conduct interviews. But I’m particularly interested in talent development for another reason: I see the Cluny Project as building a talent network of its own—a different kind of talent that will continue to emerge and become more important the further we get into the 21st century, as the cost of cognition trends toward zero.

Tyler and I talked Luca vs. LeBron (L.A. Lakers) talent dynamics, why certain Midwest towns once produced so much business talent, why Cowen thinks religious thinkers will be the most important thinkers of the coming decades, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy it!

Note: we had this conversation in a dark, jazz-club like setting with pretty terrible lighting. The Cluny team ended up having a lot of video and audio issues in post-production, which delayed our ability to publish this video for an embarrassingly long time. Please excuse the lack of quality in audio/video. Lessons were learned for when we do this in the future… You should still be able to fully watch/listen to the conversation with minimal distraction, though, as we put in a lot of work to get into a version that is serviceable these past couple of months. Thanks.

My best,
Luke

Three short N.B.’s before my new essay:

1) Next Summer’s Cluny Conference: Tickets for the ZOE Conference (“Life Abundant in an Artificial Age”) are available to subscribers of this newsletter at a 20% discount until Nov. 10. Please use code “antimimetic” at checkout. While speakers haven’t been announced yet, I can tell you that Girard’s name will surely be invoked (for those interested in the mimetic and anti-mimetic dimensions of the theme, abundant life…)

2) Hiring for a Full-Time Role: I’m hiring an apprentice—either part-time or full-time—in a marketing and operations role ASAP. It’s not for the tame, as you’ll be thrown quickly into the publishing industry and the media worlds and tasked with approaching everything differently (there are no good models!)… But the upside is practically infinite, and we’ll have a lot of fun building something important together. If interested, please apply here.

3) DC Halloween Event / SF Party: Cluny is hosting Dasha Nekrasova for a live event on …

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I’ve just finished my upcoming book, THE ONE AND THE NINETY-NINE: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion (June 2026), submitted to St. Martin’s Press last week.

First: thank you for your patience this past year, as my work here slowed down so I could focus on the most important words I have ever written. I expect to be back in full force soon. Your support of my work here means more than you know.

I’ve never felt so vulnerable as I did in writing this book because it required me to tell parts of my own story I’ve never shared publicly before. Nor have I ever felt so convicted of the importance of sharing them, because I know they can help others make sense of this moment, and the liminal spaces in their own lives—when we are not who we once were, but not yet fully who we will become.

As the…

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“But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” — Daniel 12:4

Dear Readers,

In July 2026, I’ll be hosting ZOË—a gathering in Napa, California—one I’m thrilled to finally announce.

Our moment can feel like it’s oriented toward death—suicides and overdoses, debt and cynicism, depression and anxiety, ugly aesthetics, endless discourse. Across politics, geographies, and ideologies, there’s a growing sense that life together is getting thinner.

ZOË, the theme of the gathering, is against death. In the New Testament Greek, zoē (ζωή) refers to abundant life—not mere survival (bios, or biological life), but a human being fully alive.

Secure a Spot

ZOË will be a three-day gathering convening leaders from Athens (arts and philosophy), Jerusalem (faith and religion), and Silicon Valley (technology and venture) to ask the most basic—and urgent—questions:

• What is life?

• What does abundant life look and feel like now?

• Wh…

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It was a difficult summer. My wife and I had to put a pet down, juggle demanding work and parenting, and face a difficult health diagnosis in the extended family. My dad’s dementia has continued its course. In the middle of it all, while carrying what often felt like a crushing weight, I was trying to finish a book.

In early August, I had an unexpected lunch with a friend at Hope College that I hadn’t seen in three years. He told me about the school’s degree program for men serving long sentences at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, about an hour’s drive north. I learned that one of the teachers had introduced my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, in a first-year seminar, in an effort to help the men think seriously about what it is they wanted—and to help them understand the way that conflict happens in the prison environment.

I was told that one student in that class became so captivated by mimetic theory that he tracked down and read everything he could fi…

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Would you please consider casting a vote that will bring a talk from me on the general theme of my next book to SXSW in Austin next year? All you need to do is hit the ‘heart’ next to the talk title (you might need to create an account first, which takes about 10 seconds).

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The most dangerous forms of manipulation don’t look like manipulation at all. They wear the language of virtue—humility, sacrifice, obedience. But instead of shaping the soul, they slowly unravel it. This is spiritual manipulation. And it strikes deeper than any other because it doesn’t just hijack your thoughts or feelings—it hijacks your sense of what is right.

What Spiritual Manipulation Is

Spiritual manipulation is the dangerous use of spiritual categories—things like guilt, shame, humility, obedience, or the redemptive value of suffering—to subvert the action of the Spirit. It clouds the conscience. It distorts desire. And ultimately, it deadens the soul in the service of a false good.

It’s different from ordinary psychological manipulation. Playing hard to get, for instance—masking your own desire to increase someone else’s—is a fairly harmless form of psychological maneuvering. It takes place on the worldly plane. You …

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Two brief announcements before this week’s essay, in which I venture into Daoism:

1. Workshop: There are still 2 weeks left to apply for “The Foundations of Agency”, a 40-day workshop I developed with the novelist Jordan Castro. It starts in late September. You can learn more and apply here.

2. Work with me: I’m looking for a Marketing partner for a part-time role starting immediately. This person will work extremely closely with me to help launch my new book—but the possibilities extend far beyond that. I expect this position to grow into a full-time role within 12 months. You can learn more here.

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It’s been 9 months in the making. THE FOUNDATIONS OF AGENCY—a new workshop that I developed with novelist Jordan Castro—is now open for enrollment. The first 6-week cohort kicks off the last week of September.

Learn More & Apply

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