The Cornerstone Forum

Pope Benedict has challenged us “to reinvest with some concrete and particular meaning theological statements about the uniqueness and the absolute value of Christianity,” but he has also pointed the way by suggesting that a collaboration between theology and anthropology can lead to “the truly most exciting part of Christian faith.” The Cornerstone Forum is a product of that excitement and an effort to communicate it to others. For several decades, the Cornerstone Forum has worked to bring René Girard’s extraordinary anthropological contribution to human self-understanding into fruitful dialogue with the theological tradition exemplified by Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar and others, and to bring these riches to the attention of a wider, non-academic audience. Both Girard and these theologians would concur with what the future Benedict XVI wrote in his first book, namely that the Cross of Christ “has uncovered the lost center of the world’s circle, thus giving their true dimensions and meaning to the movement both of individual lives and of human history as a whole.”