Lonergan: therapy for cultural confusion...

(Vatican Radio) An international conference took place place at the Pontifical Gregorian University last week focusing on “Revising Lonergan’s anthropology “. Canadian Bernard Lonergan who was born in 1904 and died in 1984, is a Jesuit most noted for his work on philosophical and theological method. Author of «Insight: A Study in human Understanding» and «Method in Theology» he taught at this university from 1953 to 1965.

One of the speakers at this conference is fellow Jesuit Father Michael Paul Gallagher, Professor of theology at this same university, whose special contribution to this conference is a talk by the title of : ‘Lonergan therapy for cultural confusion ’.

Veronica Scarisbrick went round to call on him earlier in the week. This is what he told her:

" I think we're confused about truth, I think if you really pushed many people would be hard-put to defend how they believe in God. I think we're confused about objectivity and subjectivity, Lonergan was brilliantly clear about this having gone to the foundations.

Again I think we're very confused over how to read the evil of history, what the source of healing is. Where Lonergan would see the whole of history, what he calls the dialectic of history, as suffering from this swing, this pendulum between making a bit of progress and decline, progress and then decline again ... he specifies how what we have forgotten is the third element: redemption. We have forgotten how to bring into our thinking about history, about where history is going, that God is active in this world through us ...":

Listen: