Thank you Michael, and welcome to the Forum. Apologies for being so late in replying, but I have been travelling a great deal over the last few weeks.
I think that James concentration at the beginning of this study with the anthropological aspects of the Christian story, is essential in demonstrating the importance of one of the the basic tenets of Girard’s thought, that is, ‘we desire according to the desire of another’. In other words, we are not autonomous individuals, but very social ‘interdividuals’. I believe that as you read on you will see that James does not make an abstraction of God, but rather as he expresses it, we are the recipients of ‘an odd form of communication from God, speaking through the Son’. And, that habits are stable dispositions which we acquire over time to be able to behave in certain ways. They are what makes excellence possible. Ritual as you know is something quite different.
