James Alison

James Alison (born 4 October 1959) is an English Catholic priest and theologian.

Alison is noted for his application of René Girard's anthropological theory to Christian systematic theology and for his work on LGBT issues.

James Alison was born on 4 October 1959 in London.

He has a brother and a sister.

His father, Michael Alison, was a prominent Conservative Member of Parliament and minister in Margaret Thatcher's government.

He was an Evangelical Christian, a John Stott's convert.

His mother, Sylvia Mary Alison (née Haigh), embraced Evangelical Christianity under the influence of Billy Graham's missionary work.

Alison described his parents as "part of that generation that sought to redefine Christianity as being a hardline, moralistic and conservative political social movement".

Alison went to Eton College, a prestigious boarding school.

Alison left the Church of England at the age of eighteen to join the Roman Catholic Church.

He studied Spanish and History at New College of the University of Oxford.

After the second year of his bachelor's degree, he went to Mexico on student exchange, at the end of which joined the Mexican Dominicans in 1981.

There, he completed a postulancy and started the novitiate with Raul Vera as his novice master.

"For cultural and temperamental differences", he left Mexico in 1983 to complete novitiate in England, at Blackfriars, Oxford.

There, his novice master was Herbert McCabe, in Alison's opinion, "probably the most significant Thomistic thinker in the English language in the 20th century" and "a wonderful teacher, and something of a father figure to me".

In 1985, Alison came across René Girard's book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. This encounter with the French thinker has produced a seismic and lasting impact.

In 1986, Alison took part in a conference organised by the English Dominicans to propose Catholic pastoral involvement with AIDS.

This led to his first publication, a CTS pamphlet, Catholic and AIDS: Questions and Answers.

In 1987, Alison went to continue his studies at the Jesuit theology faculty in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

While working on his theology degree between 1987 and 1990, he ministered to people with AIDS who – in Alison's words – "it would be more accurate to say were dying with AIDS than living, because this was before any of the cocktails [...] 80% died within five months of first symptom, so a lot of what I was doing was giving people last rites and burial."

He was ordained in 1988.

In 1990-94, Alison worked on his doctoral thesis about original sin at the Jesuit theology faculty in Belo Horizonte.

Starting from Alison's first monograph, Knowing Jesus (1993), this influence has been made explicit.

In this book, he introduced the idea of "the intelligence of the victim" to explain the change taking place in Jesus' disciples after meeting the risen Christ.

He defended it successfully in November 1994.

At Easter 1995, he left the Dominicans realising he was a "guest, not a member" there.

Since 1995 onwards, Alison remained a priest, though not incardinated in any diocese.

In the following six years, he moved countries seven times living in Latin America, the United States and the UK.

In 1997, Alison produced a monograph, Living in the End Times (also published as Raising Abel), which was an adaptation and  translation of the course on Eschatology delivered at the Instituto Pedro de Cordoba, Chile, in 1994.

In 1998, the English-language version of his doctorate was published under the title The Joy of Being Wrong.

In 2001, the Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay was published.

It was the first book in which Alison attempted to set Catholic theology and Girardian insights into the context of the experience of a gay man and the wider LGBTQ+ community.

He admits this task was not an easy one: “There is nothing elegant about inhabiting a space which has historically, socially and theologically been regarded at best as risible and at worst as evil”.

In the following years, three more collections of essays and talks appeared: On Being Liked (2004), Undergoing God (2006) and Broken Hearts and New Creations (2010) - written broadly from the same perspective as the Faith Beyond Resentment.

Since 2008, Alison has been awarded a fellowship at Imitatio, the organisation set up by the Thiel Foundation for researching and promoting René Girard's thought.

For a while, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil.

In 2013, he produced the Jesus the Forgiving Victim, a multimedia course of induction into the Christian faith for adults which follows on from the insight into desire associated with René Girard.

In 2020, Alison started Praying Eucharistically, a project exploring the ways of worshipping and Christian living in the Covid lockdown.

For this project, he provides the appropriate liturgical texts for people celebrating at home, and offers Gospel readings and homilies in video format for Sundays and main festivities of the liturgical year.

Currently he works as a travelling preacher, lecturer and retreat giver, based in Madrid, Spain.