Born in Avignon in 1923, René Girard moved in 1947 to the United States, where he taught at various universities, and where he still lives. For several decades, is an authoritative protagonist of the cultural debate in the international arena, on topics ranging from anthropology to literature, ethnology theology, philosophy of religion, psychology and sociology. The scholar Avignon has developed one of the most striking and innovative hermeneutics of the religious phenomenon. By focusing on the most enigmatic of the sacred, Girard shows that the immolation of sacrificial victims, attested in all religious traditions and mythological literature, serves to appease the "war of all against all" that is unleashed in human societies for mutual imitation of desires, with the inevitable succession of envy, jealousy, resentment, competitiveness, reprisals and revenge, which trigger a vortex of ever-expanding aggression and threatening. Almost on the verge of self-destruction, the community finds a way to download a victim of violence, which acts as a "scapegoat" and to which is assigned after a sacred value, precisely because it brings peace and founded the social bond. The myths and rituals have hidden the innocence of the victim, but the biblical revelation, culminating in the Gospel accounts of Christ's passion, has finally revealed the lie victimary, in such a way that Christianity can not be absolutely equivalent to a simple variant of pagan myths. Proving that the religious phenomenon is at the heart of human culture and social organization, Girard provides one of the most serious and documented answers to those who want to exclude religion from the public sphere, relegating in the private spaces of the psyche or in the sphere of the irrational.