Hoping for your help... - The Cornerstone Forum | fostering a whole-hearted faith in a half-hearted world

Our Fall Appeal: Teachers and Patterns

This year’s Fall Appeal comes as Pope Leo XIV on All Saints’ Day proclaimed St. John Henry Newman ‘Doctor of the Church’ and co-patron of the Church’s educational mission. Such serendipitous timing could only be seen as providential for the work of the Cornerstone Forum as we continue to bring Girardian mimetic theory into contemporary debates and conversations concerning human self understanding and the Catholic theological tradition. It will be no surprise to those familiar with Gil Bailie’s work to be reminded of his contribution in the 2012 festschrift For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and in Truth in which Gil introduces his reflections on his mentor with a quote from (now St.) John Henry Newman’s 1832 Oxford sermon on personal influence. Today in a world swirling with corporate funded social media influencers and the ubiquitous scrolling versions of online mis- or dis- information Gil’s words appear prophetic,

…language, though it is the obvious instrument for the propagation of truth, is inadequate for the task. Truth and human language, he argues, “are incommensurate.” “Nothing is so easy as to be religious on paper,” he writes, and, as for the power of argumentation, it is hounded and hampered by a mimetic problematic which Newman intuits with perspicacity: “the warfare between Error and Truth is necessarily advantageous to the former.” (read Gil’s entire essay here)

Our task, as ever, is nevertheless to present the truth of the Gospel with the tools at hand for the world we face today. Gil Bailie’s talks from the past thirty years now available as free podcasts, his written published works in print, e-book, and in some cases as audio book versions, The Cornerstone Forum website/blog, and Substack make up a significant contribution to this work. Our many faithful donors by their generosity have made all of this possible. But much work is yet to be done as the challenges we face transform the world in ways inhospitable to truth, goodness, and beauty. Just as we understand the inadequacy of mere words in transmitting the message -language cannot be dismissed as a tool of influence in our efforts to foster a whole-hearted faith in a half-hearted world.

Earlier this year we received an email from a high school humanities instructor teaching in his school’s Great Books honors program. He writes:

I recently discovered your podcast series on Dante’s Divine Comedy and have been impressed by the wealth of resources available through Cornerstone Forum. As a recent Catholic convert, I was particularly pleased to learn of your Catholic scholarship and your friendship with René Girard. My undergraduate thesis supervisor was a Girard scholar, so I have long, likewise, benefited from Girard’s insights.

While I will be applying to law school this year and hope to begin next fall, I don’t want to lose my passion for theology, philosophy, and the humanities. I now see Cornerstone Forum as an important resource for continuing to cultivate these intellectual interests alongside my legal studies.

With all that being said, this is simply a note of gratitude for the years of research, scholarship, and faithful service you have provided to students and thinkers like me who are eager to engage deeply with the great questions and texts of our tradition.

(Alex Lessard met with this impressive young man for coffee recently, and in addition to becoming a closer friend of the work of the Cornerstone Forum and its principals, there are great possibilities for collaboration with him in the future.)

Such expressions of gratitude are given and received reciprocally (in true mimetic fashion) for this is the apostolate the Cornerstone Forum has labored in for over thirty years.

In the days ahead our co-executive director Alex Lessard’s efforts through the Adeodatus initiative for the renewal of Catholic liberal education will be bringing St. John Henry Newman’s works into hundreds of colleges, high schools, cathedrals, churches, and Newman Centers around the country through a 25-panel exhibition celebrating Newman’s life, work, and new role as co-patron of Catholic education and Doctor of the Universal Church. It is hoped that in coming years parents and teachers under whose care the education of young people is brought will model just such a pattern as Gil describes in the final paragraph of his essay:

It is impossible for me to sum up what René Girard’s work has meant to me, and how it has changed my life and influenced my work. His thought and his friendship have led me to a deeper understanding of the anthropological meaning of Christian sacramentality—especially as it informs the idea of the person as a living sacrament. What John Henry Cardinal Newman says in his 1832 sermon applies to René Girard and his legacy: Truth can have its full impact, only when conveyed, not by discursive argumentation, but by the living exemplars “who are at once the teachers and the patterns of it.”