Word: lonergans
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Others who have been influenced by Lonergan also see him, in a somewhat different focus, as a major catalyst in their thinking. Notre Dame's David Burrell and John Dunne, Chicago Divinity School's David Tracy, and Humanities Professor Michael Novak of the State University of New York, all studied under Lonergan at the Gregorian, and each attributes his own free-roaming theological method to Lonergan's influence. "Insight gave me the freedom to go on through trusting my own understanding," says Burrell. "It is not the system," says Dunne, "but what Lonergan does. He moves from...
Perilous Adventure. Lonergan himself insists that "there is no such thing as a Lonerganian"; by its very nature, he says, his method "destroys totalitarian ambitions." Insight is "a way of asking people to discover in themselves what they are." Yet the very openness of Lonergan's method, notes Utrecht University Theologian Henri Nouwen, makes his approach to self-realization a perilous personal adventure. The answer to intellectual blindness-or scotosis, as Lonergan calls it by its Greek name-is that each human being must lay himself open to the sheer terror of selfdiscovery...
...Lonergan repeatedly emphasizes that self-discovery demands considerable individual responsibility. In a recent essay on "The Absence of God in Modern Culture," he points out that honest concern for the future of the world must begin with self-transcendence. "If it is not just high-sounding hypocrisy," Lonergan concludes, "concern for the future supposes rare moral attainment. It calls for what Christians name heroic charity...
Some of his critics object that such earnest expressions of Christian love are all too rare in Lonergan's work-that he is too rational, that the dimensions of feeling are absent. Lonergan replies simply that love is already at the heart of the matter. "Being-in-love is a fact. It's a first principle. Being-in-love doesn't need any justification, just as you don't explain God, God is the ultimate explanation. Love is something that proves itself...
...Lonergan does not pretend to comprehend everything, but only to offer a dynamic viewpoint in which everything may be seen to be part of an interrelated whole. It is at heart a simple method but, like Jesus' great commandment of love, it is not easy. Critics who say that it offers too many answers do not grasp the essential Lonergan. What he may offer, for many people, is too many challenges. Despite the promise of an ultimate horizon, there is in that offer no solid assurance of an answer that can be grasped in mortal life. There is only...