Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Robert Gerald Hamerton-Kelly (December 26, 1938 – July 7, 2013) was a Christian theologian, ordained United Methodist pastor, ethics scholar, and author and editor of several books on religion and violence. He served as Dean of the Chapel at Stanford Memorial Church at Stanford University for 14 years and was on the faculty of the university for more than 30 years. A leading advocate of the work of René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, Hamerton-Kelly co-founded several organizations dedicated to the study of the theory and edited several important texts about it.

Education and early career Hamerton-Kelly was born in Cape Town, South Africa. He attended the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University, from which he received a bachelor's degree in 1958. He received a second bachelor's and a master's in theology from the University of Cambridge in 1965. He also met his wife, Rosemary, at Cambridge, with whom he had three children. From 1966 to 1970, he was an assistant professor of religion at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Hamerton-Kelly's Christian perspective in the subject led him to write several books which interpret New Testament writings from a Girardian perspective: these include Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross, published in 1992; and The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark, published in 1994.

He was a co-founder of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion, which works to further research and discuss the themes of Girard's work. Another of Hamerton-Kelly's key works was editing 1987's Violent Origins: Walter Burkett, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, a collection of essays from early meetings of the colloquium by Girard, Jonathan Z. Smith, Walter Burkert, Burton L. Mack, and Renato Rosaldo, among others. He started a speaker series in Woodside that featured several former Stanford colleagues, including Condoleezza Rice and former United States Secretary of Defense William Perry. Hamerton-Kelly served as the organization's first president from 2007 to 2010, when he retired to become Chairman Emeritus. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2010. He died in 2013 after a stroke and short illness.