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Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation

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Schwager is a Jesuit (he died a few years ago) who spent much of his academic life dialoguing with Rene Girard and working out the implications of Girard's theory for theology.

In this book, taking seriously man's evolution, he seeks to unravel, using mimetic theory, how original sin entered into humanity during evolution. This book makes fascinating reading because it tries to do what Catholicism seeks to do, namely take the complimentarity of faith and reason seriously. Thus, Schwager interprets the Genesis narratives in light of mimetic theory. For fundamentalists/literalists, all is explained, but Schwager shows how exciting is the process of man's evolution , his awarness of the transcendent dimension and how sin penetrated human evolution. Now, the book is a little frustrating because what we get from Schwager is essentially some initial thoughts/sketches which need to be worked out in time. Let me just give one quote from page 50 as a taster:

"We see that organisms living today have a "memory" that extends back to determinative events and "bifurcations" in the early history of the cosmos and of life. Human beings belong to these organisms. From this viewpoint, therefore, a doctrine is not surprising which holds that all present humans bear wihin themselves the memory of another form of bifurcation, of a deviation from the right way in the beginning of humna history."