Scott Cowdell is Research Professor in Theology at Charles Sturt University, Canberra. In 2024, after 36 years of Anglican ministry in Australian parishes, seminaries, and universities, he was received into the Catholic Church with a view to becoming a priest there. He is the author of eleven books—most recently René Girard and the Nonviolent God and Mimetic Theory and its Shadow: Girard, Milbank, and Ontological Violence. With Joel Hodge and Chris Fleming he co-edits Bloomsbury Academic’s “Violence, Desire, and the Sacred” series. In 2023, Cowdell was Dean’s Scholar at the Virginia Theological Seminary. He lives in Canberra, Australia.
 

"Too often the faithful sacramental Christian life has been dismissed as ‘inherited Church’. Scott Cowdell helps us to see the Church freshly, as if for the first time, and shows its central importance as the steady heartbeat of our life in God. He compares trying to embody God’s love without it as trying to surf without a surfboard. We ignore his vision at our peril."—Alison Milbank, professor of Theology and Literature at Nottingham University

"Writing with wit and wisdom Cowdell helps us recover the significance of the obvious, namely, that Christianity is unintelligible without the church. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor his account of how the church can survive and flourish in modernity is as imaginative as it is hopeful. This is a book in theology that is at once constructive and a delight to read."—Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at the Divinity School at Duke University, and author of A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic