Beguiling Belonging

What if true goodness does not need our protection, and what if any goodness that we feel that we need to protect is likely fake? This is the question that James Alison asks us to consider in the chapters that make up this volume. Following Ren Girard, he asks us to look inward and to examine ourselves prayerfully in the light of grace.Alison shows us what he has learned through his experience of sitting with his own pain and the pain of others, namely, that the love of God is not subject to the laws of our manufactured forms of belonging and is not bound by our fears of being exposed as constructors of fake goodness.from the forewordBeguiling Belonging rethinks questions of catholicity, ecclesiology, and belonging through the lens of Ren Girards anthropology. The chapters examine how Jesuss life, death, and resurrection unmask humanitys scapegoat mechanism and demonstrate that, in Christs self-offering, this violent dynamic is decisively undone. The result is an invitation for Christians to rediscover their identity not as belonging to a sacred institution that draws boundaries around insiders and outsiders, but rather to a reconciling body that refuses to remain blind to its collective tendencies toward creating false unity at the expense of others.James Alison