I wish to correlate Bernard Lonergan’s functional specialty Communications with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of novelistic discourse with the goal of teasing out how the Bakhtinian notion of discourse furthers on-going reflection on inculturation. Theology as a highly differentiated and specialized reflection on religion bears fruit in the final stage (Communications) of theological reflection. This fruit – inculturation – can be explained using different constructs. This paper privileges the Bakhtinian construct in that it addresses “the life and behavior of discourse in (...) a contradictory and multi-languaged world” in ways that Lonergan’s differentiated and specialized reflection on theology accounts for multiplicity of cultural traditions in an ever-changing world church. (shrink)

The theme of “presence” holds an ambivalent place in Gerald O'Collins’ Christology. On the one hand the theme is O'Collins’ “most creative contribution to contemporary Christology” and on the other hand the notion itself is a difficult and stubborn concept that can be best understood in an evolutionary way. This deeper analysis of “presence,” which is not offered by O'Collins, occupies a center stage in Bernard Lonergan's Christology. This essay mediates O'Collins’ account of “presence” with Lonergan's evolutionary understanding of the (...) term—a scientific theological account Lonergan worked out in dialogue with phenomenology and the sciences. The paper argues that such a mediation is necessitated by the fact that the meaning of “presence” is key to understanding the Chalcedonian definition of the union of the two natures of Christ, an important Christian dogmatic teaching that both O'Collins and Lonergan consider sacrosanct, and that a clarification of this meaning advances not only Christian understanding of Christ's presence in history, but also Christ's presence in non-Christian religions. (shrink)

This article revisits ideas of Charles Peirce, who wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Bernard Lonergan, who wrote at the turn of the twentieth, with the purpose of connecting important dots in their thinking. The goal of this comparison is to show how the two ground metaphysics in the practices of the sciences and common sense. The article argues that the metaphysical framework the two scholars developed in opposition to nominalism can be used to overcome the reductionism (...) that hinders modern efforts to think metaphysically as well to as promote fruitful dialogue between theology and philosophy. (shrink)

Lonergan writes both of a foundation for human knowing as well as of a functional specialty he termed ‘foundations’. Neither of these is the same as ‘foundation’ as the term is used by nonfoundationalists. Lack of clarity and differentiation regarding what is meant by ‘foundationalism’ sometimes informs the perception that Lonergan is a foundationalist. The burden of this essay is to show that Lonergan's philosophical and theological thought, as well as his use of the term ‘foundations’, fall awkwardly, if at (...) all, under anti-foundationalist strictures. There is a need to clarify and differentiate a range of terms and concepts in this regard. Lonergan shares with anti-foundationalists the rejection of ocular metaphors and other naïve approaches to human knowing. Lonergan's own search for ‘foundations’, which I argue is critical for a world Church consciousness and meets the Rahner-test for a world Church, is part of an overall project to situate knowing within identifiable, recurring patterns in the operations of human consciousness. (shrink)