Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1645436 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Customer Reviews

This could change your way of thinking
Yes this is difficult to understand in places and yet it is worth perservering. I think it offers insights to individuals, groups and cultures as to why we, as humans, seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. It offers a chance to re-evaluate the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, to the world and to what is sacred/divine.

Enriching sequel to "Faith Beyond Resentment"
The genius of James Alison's theology is that it re-energises traditional theological concepts - whether Biblical, patristic or medieval - in such a way that they remain viable and intact even while all trace of violent patriarchy or scholastic aridity seems to have been excised from them. For this he owes an incomparable debt, of course, to the theory of mimetic desire and violent scapegoating pioneered by the French academic Rene Girard. Alison inhabits the Girardian thought-world with a fluid ease that makes Girard's sometimes dry presentation come to vivid life and reveals the seemingly infinite scope of its implications for theology and ecclesiology.

"On Being Liked" is a sequel to Alison's own ground-breaking work "Faith Beyond Resentment", which was addressed primarily to gay Roman Catholics who struggle to reconcile their faith with church teaching on homosexuality. Alison's account of the foundational event in Christian life, the crucifixion/resurrection of Christ, follows the Girardian template. God, in human form, by willingly occupying humankind's self-created 'place of shame', a location at once satanic and 'sacred', unmasks for all time the violent sacrificial mechanism that we unconsciously deploy in order to maintain a social order that sustains itself by the creation of victims. Such a social order was not unique to first century Palestine, but has always and everywhere been the case. Alison's gaze has particularly dwelt on the manner in which scapegoating remains operative in present day ecclesiological structures, as exemplified by the Vatican's hostile language about and treatment of openly gay and lesbian Catholics. It requires a very small leap of imagination to see how the creation of a demonic 'other' functions in all manner of ways, both secular and religious, parochially and globally, and indeed how we are all implicated in such a dynamic. Alison's challenge to gay and lesbian Catholics - a challenge whose basic theological structure gives it a broad applicability beyond the specific parameters of Roman Catholicism or the debate about homosexuality - is not to make of their own scapegoating at the hands of the Vatican a sacred cult in itself, one in which their persecutors are themselves demonised and, in turn, scapegoated. Rather, all are called, regardless of sexuality, to inhabit the space that Christ opened up through his cross and resurrection, a place of folly in the eyes of the world, yet, for the those who willingly occupy it, a place in which the function of shame is exposed and dissolved by participation in a new humanity, no longer dependent upon violent scapegoating and the idolatrous cult of the sacred victim.

We can meet this challenge only by the grace of God, a God who not only loves us, but, as Alison explains, actually 'likes' us. Alison shows how even the concept of 'love' can be distorted and made oppressive by those caught up in the mechanism of mimetic violence. He suggests that in Jesus, God has shown that he is our friend, liking each and every one of us, regardless of our status within the church or society, or indeed our sexual orientation. By recovering the sense of God's actually liking us, we are far less likely to be wounded by deficient proclamations of God's love delivered by those themselves not fully possessed by it, and therefore unable to manifest it in its fullness. And by the same token, we may also begin to be able to like those who persecute us, and so also to love them, rather than merely playing lip service to Jesus' command to love our enemies, whilst in fact continuing to harbour hatred for them in our hearts. Easier said than done, of course. If, however, and always by the grace of God, we can tentatively extend to our persecutors the hand of friendship rather than showing the snarling face of resentment - and simply keep on unflinchingly extending that hand, however many times it is scorned or rejected - we will at least know that we are playing our part in God's salvific work of dissolving the 'sacred' place of shame that enslaves us all.

Like its predecessor, "On Being Liked" has a theological and spiritual resonance that extends way beyond the community to whom it is primarily addressed. It is a book to argue with, to be challenged and even perhaps enraged by, but also to be cherished for daring to imagine a radically orthodox Christ-centred church beyond the impasse in which both traditionalists and gay Christians have for so long been confined.

Difficult
I found that large sections of this book were impossible to understand. I felt that the author found it very difficult to write. Or, perhaps, this was written in a style of religious writing with which I am not familiar.