Biblical perspective on life’s problems

Sydney
13 July 2003

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Biblical perspective on life’s problems

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Biblical perspective on life’s problems

Gil Bailie (pictured) is president of the California-based Cornerstone Forum, which is described as a “non-profit educational organisation concerned with today’s cultural and spiritual crisis and with recovering the Christian moral and intellectual resources required to assess this crisis, meet its challenge, and comprehend its religious significance”.

By Chris Fleming

It was once said that if anthropologists could learn how to communicate, journalists would be out of a job. Journalists are no longer required simply to report on the world that they see, but are expected to interpret it for us - not just to describe the events they witness, but to put those events into some wider context so that these can be understood.

Needless to say, journalism is flourishing - perhaps because cultural anthropologists and philosophers still haven’t learnt to communicate.

Until they do, however, we’re lucky to have people like Gil Bailie, who will address a seminar, give a public lecture and lead a public conference - The History of Hope and the Hope of History - in Sydney on July 18-20.

Gil Bailie is an engaging speaker and gifted American writer (his book Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads, NY, Crossroad, 1995, won the 1996 Pax Christi USA Book Award) who has a knack for interpreting the most pressing social and psychological problems we face today.

And he accomplishes this from an explicitly biblical perspective, which adds to the potency and intellectual coherence of his analyses.

Although he is a scholar in his own right, he draws extensively on the work of the cultural and literary theorist René Girard, (b 1923), a French Catholic thinker whose body of work has been characterised by some as representing a ‘Copernican revolution’ in the human sciences.

Few people in Australia may be familiar with his work, but Girard has achieved a significant level of fame in Europe. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from half-a-dozen European universities and his books have been translated into 15 languages.

In addition, the impact of his thought has extended across a remarkably wide range of disciplines - from literary theory, anthropology and philosophy to psychology, economics, and theology.

He sees a rich armoury of intellectual resources in the Judeo-Christian tradition which, he claims, decisively outflank non-religious insights with regard to their ability to describe and diagnose the competitive and often violent predicament of the contemporary world.

Gil Bailie skilfully employs poetry, popular songs, drama and news of contemporary events to demonstrate that Girard’s work has startling relevance for everyday life: for day-to-day relations between people; for the understanding and practice of our faith; and for our ability to understand the dynamics behind many local and world events.

He offers us a biblical anthropology of the nursery school and the street gang, a psychology of the discount store and sale-table, and a social-psychology of capital punishment, and illustrates both the logic and consequences of ideas that he discusses.

He achieves this without a watering down of Girard’s ideas (or a watering down of Christian ‘orthodoxy’, for that matter).

In other words, he has accomplished the seemingly impossible - popularisation without vulgarisation.

To many, Gil Bailie’s work has offered a perspective that has not only enriched their faith and appreciation of biblical texts to a remarkable extent, but offered them some genuine interpretative skills for thinking about the world at large.

The History of Hope and the Hope of History conference is an opportunity to learn of Girard’s cutting edge perspectives on our faith and the world today as developed by a gifted thinker and communicator, Gil Bailie, particularly as it relates to history, violence and the sacred.

For more information on Gil Bailie and the conference, contact John Dacey, PALMS Australia, PO Box 54, Croydon Park, NSW 2133; telephone (02) 9642 0558, fax (02) 9742 5607, email animate@palms.org.au or visit www.palms.org.au/bailie.htm

Dr Chris Fleming is a lecturer in philosophy and cultural theory in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. His work has appeared in journals such as Griffith Law Review; Body & Society; Anthropoetic and Public Understanding of Science. His book, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis, is forthcoming with Polity Press (Cambridge, UK).

GIL BAILIE SCHEDULE

Seminar: The current religious challenge, Peter Johnson building, University of Technology Sydney, 2-4.30pm Friday, July 18.

Lecture: The vanishing power of the usual reign, Peter Johnson building, University of Technology Sydney, 7-9pm Friday, July 18.

Conference: The history of hope and the hope of history, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield campus, 9am-5pm Saturday and 10am-3pm Sunday, July 19-20.