As a young man, he had been an atheist, inspired by the secular existentialism of Sartre and Camus. He had written most of Deceit, Desire and the Novel in what he called “demystification mode”, aiming to reveal the delusions of mimetic desire. Then, one day, commuting from Baltimore to teach in Pennsylvania while completing his first book, he had an experience of the transcendent, observing the sun glinting on the industrial wasteland alongside the tracks. This, and a cancer scare, caused him to return to the Catholic faith of his mother.

While Girard described himself as a centrist, his ideas are now celebrated by a movement that, while not unilaterally rightwing, incubated the policies of the Trump administration. [...] Some conservatives today consider Derrida’s thought (or “postmodernism”, as they usually call it) to be the source of modern society’s ills. Girard later joked that, by inviting Derrida, he and his fellow conference organisers had let the plague into America.

"Whatever Girard read, he seemed to discover confirmation of his ideas."

There is one moment in I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning that recent readers have fixated upon. Girard mentions that the Christian concern for the victims could be exploited in ways that were deceptive and instrumental. In one late interview, he associated this “caricature” of Christian values with the figure of the Antichrist. These brief and suggestive remarks have been taken up by Girard’s more radical readers as a prescient critique of contemporary liberalism.

"What would Girard say about the politics of today, America’s new immigration policies or the escalating trade war between the US and China?"