Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Th.D is pastor of the Woodside Village Church in Woodside , Calif. From 1986 to 1997, he was a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University . He specialized in the ethics of nuclear weapons, and the ethics of military intervention, with special attention to ethnic conflicts in Central Europe . During this period, he traveled extensively in Central Europe , especially Hungary , Romania , Slovakia , and the Czech Republic . He was chiefly interested in the psychosocial elements in ethnic conflict, categories like vengeance, resentment, envy and scapegoating, and the parts religion and quasi-religion play in these processes. In these researches he has been influenced by the thought of Rene Girard, with whom he has worked closely, as a colleague at Stanford, for the past 20 years.

His formal training was in biblical studies, especially the New Testament. From 1972 to 1986, he was Dean of the Chapel and minister of Memorial Church at Stanford, Consulting Professor of religious studies and, by courtesy, of classics. Since retiring from Stanford in 1997, he has devoted himself to the study of the Greek Fathers of the church and to the writing of sermons and other explicitly Christian texts.

He is a founding member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, an international colloquium, which has met biannually for the last eight years in the United States and Europe .

Rev. Hamerton-Kelly has authored, edited, or contributed to several volumes including: The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark (with Rene Girard; Fortress, 1993); Violent Origins (Stanford University Press, 1988); God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus (Fortress, 1979); and Preexistence, Wisdom, and the Son of Man (Wipf & Stock, 1991).

Selected Bibliography

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert. Pre-Existence, Wisdom, and the Son of Man. Wipf & Stock Publishers: 2001.

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert and Rene Girard. The Gospel and the Sacred; Poetics of Violence in Mark. Fortress Press: 1993.

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert (Ed.). Violent Origins: Walter Burkett, René Girard, and Johnathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation. Stanford University Press: 1988.