Overcoming the “Distance”: Robert Doran as a Bridge between the Trinitarian Analogies of Bernard Lonergan and Hans Urs von Balthasar

Bernard Lonergan and Hans Urs von Balthasar would appear to be worlds apart in their trinitarian theologies. The former championed while the latter eschewed the traditional Western psychological analogy. And yet, Robert Doran’s Lonergan-inflected trinitarian theology presented a revised version of the psychological analogy, drawn from the order of grace. This analogy is in fact isomorphic to Balthasar’s primary eucharistic analogy for the trinitarian processions. Recognizing formal similarity invites a rapprochement between these two theologies and a call for a renewal of boldness in speculative theology.

“And We Shall See Him Face to Face”: A Trinitarian Analysis of the Beatific Vision

A traditional account of the beatific vision has focused attention on our vision of the divine essence. However, little attention has been paid to the trinitarian aspects of the vision. This article proposes a trinitarian account of the beatific vision drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran and the so-called four-point hypothesis. It concludes that, so conceived, the beatific vision is analogous to an exchange of wedding vows.

The Universe Is on Our Side

There has been a breakdown in American public life that no election can fix. Americans cannot even converse about politics. All the usual explanations for our condition have failed to make things better. Bruce Ledewitz shows that America is living with the consequences of the Death of God, which Friedrich Nietzsche knew would be momentous and irreversible. God was this culture’s story of the meaning of our lives. Even atheists had substitutes for God, like inevitable progress. Now we have no story and do not even think about the nature of reality. That is why we are angry and despairing. America’s future requires that we begin a new story by each of us asking a question posed by theologian Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side? When we commit to live honestly and fully by our answer to that question, even if our immediate answer is no, America will begin to heal. Beyond that, pondering the question of the universe will allow us to see that there is more to the universe than blind forces and dead matter. Guided by the naturalism of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and the historical faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we can learn to trust that the universe bends toward justice and our welfare. That conclusion will complete our healing and restore faith in American public life. We can live without God, but not without thinking about holiness in the universe.

Is the Universe on Our Side?

America cannot go on this way without risking the end of constitutional democracy. We have already entered post-liberalism. But there is something to be done. We can launch a new story, and thus begin to recover normal public life, by asking the ultimate question bequeathed to us by Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side? Asking an ultimate question restores faith in questioning itself. That kind of questioning ends the Age of Evasion. We ask Lonergan’s question through a loose cultural entity he called “cosmopolis.” As long as we agree to live by our answer to this question, even a no can contribute to the healing of American public life.

Introduction

In 1972, the Canadian Jesuit theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan asked a question, in two parts, that he thought every human being must ultimately answer: Is the universe on our side, or are we just gamblers and, if we are gamblers, are we not perhaps fools, individually struggling for authenticity and collectively endeavoring to snatch progress from the ever-mounting welter of decline? . . . Does there or does there not necessarily exist a transcendent, intelligent ground of the universe?...

From De-Humanization to the Flourishing Feast: A Study of Ecological Conversion by means of a Triple Colloquy with Pope Francis, Pope John Paul II, and Bernard Lonergan, S.J.

This paper will first source Pope Francis’s notion of ecological conversion with Pope John Paul II’s writings that advocate for an awakening of humanity to a harmony with nature and one another. Second, using Bernard Lonergan’s notion of conversion as the foundational structure of religion, this paper will establish ecological conversion as an authentic movement into living more consciously as a member of the body of Christ. Finally, this paper will address how ecological conversion can reverse the destructive cycle of decline by drawing all of creation to the great heavenly feast.

Religious feeling and authenticity: Dialogues between William James and Bernard Lonergan

The paper analyzes the tricky phenomenon of religious feelings related to the question of authenticity. The challenge to describe and make sense of this elusive relationship, providing one exists at all, becomes clearer against the background of two important figures dealing with the psychology of religion – William James (primarily a psychologist) and Bernard Lonergan (primarily a theologian). While James was a naturalist psychologist who put his study on a background of human nature and followed academic scientific discipline, Lonergan was a Christian theologian who set the goal for his whole system not on the level of cognition but on the transcending dimension of being-in-love with God. They both avoided the extremes of their positions and reached out to a more balanced way of understanding religion in its complexity and sometimes ambiguous significance in the lives of human moral subjects.

Bernard Lonergan e a Probabilidade Emergente

In Insight, an essay on human understanding, (1957, 1st edition) Lonergan presents a heuristic model of emerging probability in order to define, explain and extract norms from the dynamism common to all nature, including human nature, a dynamism that mirrors the reality of intellection. Continuity between different levels of nature discloses a directed, upward, but indeterminate dynamism of the emerging generalized probability. In addition to the ethical consequences that he elaborates, Lonergan remains in an open hermeneutic framework, beyond being proportionate to discursive reason; he opens the way for a surprising final manifestation of this universal dynamism through what he calls transcendent conjugated forms of generalized probability emerging – faith, hope and charity – that are proposed to human freedom.

Discernment and Self-Appropriation: Ignatius of Loyola and Bernard Lonergan, S.J.

Bernard Lonergan’s vocation as a Jesuit was central to his entire life’s work, although this is not well known. This essay shows the indebtedness of Lonergan’s method of self-appropriation owes a great deal to Ignatian spiritual practices. In particular, it shows how Ignatian prayer and Lonergan’s account of the structures of consciousness mutually enhance one another. In particular, it concentrates on how prayer is a transforming encounter between Christ and the one praying.