Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
30 Facts About Bernard Lonergan
2.
Bernard Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; Regis College, Toronto, as distinguished visiting professor at Boston College, and as Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.
3.
Bernard Lonergan's program was to come to terms with modern scientific, historical, and hermeneutical thinking in a comparable way.
4.
Bernard Lonergan pursued this program in his two most fundamental works, Insight and Method in Theology.
5.
One key to Bernard Lonergan's project is self-appropriation, that is, the personal discovery and personal embrace of the dynamic structure of inquiry, insight, judgment, and decision.
6.
Bernard Lonergan's hope was that his discovery and articulation of eight dynamically-related but distinct tasks would, in good time, subsume, if not replace, the splintered and oftentimes isolated results of what he called "field specialization" and "subject specialization" that prevail in the modern university.
7.
However, Bernard Lonergan did not regard this label as particularly helpful for understanding his intentions.
8.
Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was born on 17 December 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada.
9.
Bernard Lonergan respected the competence and honesty of his professors at Heythrop, but was deeply dissatisfied with their Suarezian philosophy.
10.
In 1933, Bernard Lonergan was sent for theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
11.
Bernard Lonergan was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936.
12.
Bernard Lonergan taught theology at Regis College from 1947 to 1953, and at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1964.
13.
At the Gregorian, Bernard Lonergan taught Trinity and Christology in alternate years, and produced substantial textbooks on these topics.
14.
Bernard Lonergan died at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ontario, on 26 November 1984.
15.
Bernard Lonergan described the genesis of his thought up to the mid-1950s in an interview.
16.
Bernard Lonergan produced two major exegetical studies of Thomas Aquinas: Grace and Freedom, and Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas.
17.
Bernard Lonergan's doctoral dissertation was an exploration of the theory of operative grace in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
18.
In 1945 Bernard Lonergan gave a course at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal that extended from September to April 1946 entitled "Thought and Reality," and the success of that course was the inspiration behind his decision to write the book Insight.
19.
In 1972, Bernard Lonergan published Method in Theology, which distinguishes eight groups of operations in theology.
20.
Bernard Lonergan believed that the lack of an agreed method among scholars in such fields has inhibited substantive agreement from being reached and progress from being made, whereas in the natural sciences, for example, widespread agreement among scholars on the scientific method has enabled remarkable progress.
21.
The third part, which covers much the same material as The Constitution of Christ but in a somewhat different manner, formulates what Bernard Lonergan calls "theological conclusions" from the hypostatic union regarding the ontological constitution of Christ as one person in two natures, and his psychological constitution as a single subject of two subjectivities.
22.
Bernard Lonergan produced a separate treatise on the Redemption, of uncertain date and never published.
23.
In later life while teaching at Boston College, Bernard Lonergan returned his attention to the economic interests of his younger days.
24.
From 1978 until 1983, Bernard Lonergan taught the course "Macroeconomics and the Dialectic of History" at Boston College for one semester each year.
25.
Bernard Lonergan described his philosophical program as a generalization of empirical method to investigate not only data given through exterior sensation, but the internal data of consciousness.
26.
Method, for Bernard Lonergan, is not a technique but a concrete pattern of operations.
27.
Bernard Lonergan's ideas include radical unintelligibility, theological critical realism, and functional specialization.
28.
An annual Lonergan Workshop is held at Boston College, under the leadership of Frederick G Lawrence.
29.
The proceedings of the Workshop are published under the same name, Lonergan Workshop, edited by Frederick G Lawrence.
30.
Bernard Lonergan Centres have been set up in various places.