Religious Communication Association Names SLU Professor’s Book of the Year for 2024

ST. LOUIS – Persuasions of God: Inventing the Rhetoric of René Girard by Saint Louis University’s Paul Lynch, Ph.D. was named the 2024 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association (RCA). 

Lynch, an associate professor of English at SLU, received the award at the RCA’s annual conference. The book was published in February 2024 by Penn State University Press. 

The RCA highlights religious speech, rhetoric, media, and performance and annually honors the best book, book chapter, article, and scholar in the field. The RCA Book Award is given annually for the outstanding scholarly book on religious communication. Lynch was awarded best article of the year in 2018 for “On Care for Our Common Discourse: Pope Francis’ NonModern Epideictic,” published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Lynch said he was drawn to Girard, a twentieth-century French historian, literary critic and philosopher, in part because his arguments are so apt for the current moment. Girard’s work was in the psychology of desire and mimetic theory. 

“Girard articulates an understanding of Christ that is perfectly applicable for the moment we are in,” Lynch said. “His scapegoat mechanism theory argues that individuals and societies resolve conflict in part by blaming or othering another. This is something that we see playing out right now.”

Girard’s mimetic theory proposes that human desire stems from an imitation of another’s desire, and the desire only occurs because others have deemed said object as worthwhile. 

“It gets at how we become fully-fledged humans,” Lynch said. “Do we want what we want because we want it, or because someone else has told us we should want it.”

Lynch is the author of After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching and is a co-editor of Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century: Pluralism in a Post-secular Age and Thinking. 

The RCA is an academic society founded in 1973 for scholars, teachers, students, clergy, journalists, and others who share an interest in religious speech, rhetoric, media, and performance. The association is nonsectarian and provides a setting for professionals of various faiths, or no faith, to study problems of communication and religion. 

Persuasions of God: Inventing the Rhetoric of René Girard

The nations of the global north find themselves in a post-secular or post-Christian period, one in which the practice, expression, and effects of religion are undergoing massive shifts. In Persuasions of God, Lynch pursues a project of “theo-rhetoric,” a radical new approach to speaking about the divine.

Searching for new religious forms amid the lingering influence of Christianity, Lynch turns to René Girard, one of the most important twentieth-century thinkers on the sacred and its expression within the Christian tradition. Lynch uses Girard’s mimetic theory to invent a post-Christian way of speaking to, for, and especially about God. Girard theorized the sacred as the nexus of violence, order, and sacralization that lies at the heart of religion. The project of theo-rhetoric is to reinvent God through the reimagined themes of meekness, sacrifice, atonement, and holiness. From these, Persuasions of God offers religion reimagined for the post-secular age.

An Apocalyptic Age

The College of Philosophy and Letters, the Department of English and the Department of Theological Studies at SLU will host a panel discussion on Thursday, April 3, to debate what Pope Francis calls a polycrisis, or the convergence of many critical issues simultaneously facing the world today, and how the work of René Girard can inform how one faces those challenges. Lynch and a panel of experts will discuss the work of René Girard as well as Persuasions of God. 

The panel also includes Grant Kaplan, Ph.D., professor of theology; Randall Rosenberg, Ph.D., dean of the College of Philosophy and Letters; and Jennifer Sanders, Ph.D., the Mooney Professor in Catholic Studies. 

Event Details

• When: 6-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 3
• Where: Boileau Hall, 38 Vandeventer Ave.