Word: lonergans
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Rational Authority. The issue of Lonergan's approach to God became a principal focus of criticism at the Florida meeting, where Lonergan specialists were more than matched by "critical respondents." The participants heatedly debated whether any such system as Lonergan's could any longer hope to embrace all knowledge, and especially whether it could provide a proof of the existence of God. "He comes up with an argument for God out of the blue sky," objected Georgetown University's Louis Dupre. "He develops a concept of being into a concept...
Chicago Divinity School's Langdon Gilkey conceded that Lonergan's theological method has an "uneasy relationship" to his scientific method, but he applauded Lonergan's overall thought. "He has imbibed the empirical, the hypothetical the tentative," said Gilkey. "Yet within it he has a structure that breaks the back of relativism." Gilkey agrees with Boston College Philosopher David Rasmussen that, for Catholicism, Lonergan may be the liberating force that Friedrich Schleiermacher was for 19th century Protestantism. But for liberal Protestants, Gilkey notes, Lonergan could provide something of a brake to excessive subjectivism...
...Lonergan, who attended the congress sessions in a seldom-varying uniform of plaid sports shirt, slacks and windbreaker, listened attentively to both praise and criticism. At 65, with only one lung, he was remarkably energetic throughout the grueling week-long conference, dutifully setting aside spare moments to read many of the 700,000 words that participants had written about him. "I don't care whether they agree with me or dis agree with me," he said. "What matters is that they are here, talking with each other." Seminarian Joseph Collins, a well-to-do young activist who personally paid...
Jesuit Joseph Flanagan, a longtime Lonergan scholar, was much less surprised. For Flanagan, Lonergan's meth od "not only includes but demands interdisciplinary dialectic. We must learn from one another." To do otherwise, says Flanagan, simply contributes to "the pool of misunderstanding" that in Lonergan's thought lies at the source of so many of mankind's woes...
Major Catalyst. Some critics charge that Lonergan's thought is inhibited by his need to justify Catholic dogma. Charles Davis, British theologian who broke completely with the Catholic Church, admitted at the conference that "I should never have been able to leave the church had it not been for reading Lonergan. I did not have to destroy my past. I could grow out of it." Nonetheless, Davis said, Lonergan has always been an apologist for the church, and his search for a secure foundation for dogma still "governs the whole enterprise...