Our 2026 Fall Appeal

Helping the work to continue as we hope to continue the work

In the beginning….Gil Bailie circa 1990s

As we have for over two decades at this time of year we again come passing the proverbial hat around to those who have found the work of Gil Bailie and the Cornerstone Forum of importance and wish to support Gil and the Forum in its current work and ensure its availability in the coming years.

Looking back over the past decades it is humbling to recall how we have weathered changing economic and societal environments from the Great Recession and a pandemic and through the transition from mailed cassette tapes and CDs and now online streaming podcast audio. While not quite miraculous, it is certainly from our perspective a providential sign that the labor of Gil Bailie at his writing desk and, in years past, from the speaker’s podium has been blessed with faithful donors without whom The Cornerstone Forum would have faded away long ago.

As a reminder of the scope and trajectory of his work, earlier this year Gil Bailie wrote:

When I look back over the last several decades of my life, during which I have explored, and encouraged others to explore, René Girard’s scholarly legacy, I must acknowledge that something of a gap has widened between my work and that of many of those who have also harvested the fruits of Girardian thought. Like Girard himself, I have argued that my friend’s most salient anthropological insights are best appreciated when situated within the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, as that inheritance is preserved and explicated by the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition. Implicit in much that I have written is the assumption that the kinship between Girard’s most salient insight and his Catholic faith is so essential to his legacy that to ignore it is to compromise the richest and deepest implications of his work.

In his book on Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton encapsulates an essential tension in Girard’s thought: “when Religion would have maddened men,” Chesterton wrote, “Theology kept them sane.” No one has recognized with more perspicacity than Girard that archaic religion periodically maddened our ancestors by ritually orchestrating a mimetic transference of social animosity onto a single unanimously anathematized victim, whose death or expulsion brought the crisis to an end and restored social solidarity. This is surely the sort of religion that, as Chesterton understood, “maddened men.” Christians, Catholic or otherwise, remain susceptible to his scapegoating “cure” for sin-ravaged societies, large or small. For this reflex is in the social DNA of fallen creatures like ourselves, even if it has been weakened by biblical thought generally and Christian revelation specifically. For that revelation climaxes in the greatest exposé of scapegoating violence of all time: the passion and death of Jesus Christ, forever burned into human memory by the fact of the Resurrection, the incomparable inflection point in human history.

Today Gil has limited opportunities for focused time on his writing project due to health constraints but his spirit and desire to complete the project remains strong amid the challenges. Peeks into early drafts of his latest manuscript reveal his unique skill in weaving the threads of disparate narratives, writers and themes into a revelatory tapestry.

Meanwhile, the Cornerstone Forum’s executive co-directors continue to work tending their corners of the vineyard:

• Rico McCahon provides enlightening Substack posts often reflecting on themes from Gil Bailie’s past presentations and revealing their continued relevance in our often confusing current circumstances.

• Alex Lessard works diligently in bringing Gil Bailie’s work into conversation with those involved in the renewal of Catholic liberal education. It was this renewal that Gil Bailie in the early days of The Cornerstone Forum believed (and still continues to believe) to be of great importance.

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Please consider helping The Cornerstone Forum this coming year by making a generous one-time or recurring donation via our online platforms below, or if you prefer mailing a donation please send it to:

The Cornerstone Forum – 19201 Highway 12, #221, Sonoma, CA 95476