In the introduction to Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Bernard Lonergan writes of the "startling strangeness" that overtakes someone who really understands what the act of "insight" is all about. The present work is about that experience in the life of Richard Liddy as he wrestled with Insight in the 1960s. Liddy was Lonergan's student in Rome during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and in this work he recounts his encounter with Lonergan and with Insight. He includes memories of other Lonergan students as well as witnesses to the "startling strangeness" the reading of Insight engenders.

Koans are enigmatic spiritual formulas used for religious training in the Zen Buddhist tradition. This innovative religious practice is one of the most distinctive elements of this tradition, which originated in medieval China and spread to Japan and Korea. Perhaps no dimension of Asian religous has attracted so much interest in the West, and its influence is apparent from beat poetry to deconstructive literary critisism. The essays collected in this volume, all previously; unpublished, argue that our understanding of the koan tradition has been severely limited. The authors try to undermine stereotypes and problematic interpretations by examining previously unrecognized factors in the formation of the tradition, and by highlighting the rich complexity and remarkable; diversity of koan practice and literature.

In this book, conversion means abandoning a world view and starting over. Using this definition of conversion, the book examines four works: Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. The main argument of this book is that all four works contain and induce conversion. That is, all four works feature an individual who abandons a world view and starts over, and all four works exhort their engager to do the same. This book also explores the works’ requirement of cognitive imitation, wherein a person replicates the mental activities of the individual who has a conversion in the work, and of private engagement, wherein a person reads or views the work while alone. The book concludes with an argument for the educational value of the four works that appropriates Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

A quarterly review of religion, theology, and philosophy.

The Small Years is, simply, one man's account of what it meant to him to be a child.

In Show Me Your Environment, a penetrating yet personable collection of critical essays, David Baker explores how a poem works, how a poet thinks, and how the art of poetry has evolved—and is still evolving as a highly diverse, spacious, and inclusive art form. The opening essays offer contemplations on the “environment” of poetry from thoughts on physical places and regions as well as the inner aesthetic environment. Next, Baker looks at the highly distinctive achievements and styles of poets ranging from George Herbert and Emily Dickinson through poets writing today. Finally, he takes joy in reading individual poems—from the canonical to the contemporary; simply and closely.

Heaney traces the hidden history of music's presence in Christian thought, including its often unrecognized influence on key figures such as von Balthasar, Barth and Bonhoeffer. She uses Lonergan's theological framework to explore musical composition as a theological act, showing why, when and how music is a useful symbolic form. The book introduces eleven ground-breaking theologians, and each chapter offers an entry point into the thought of the theologian being presented through an original piece of music, which can be found on the companion website: https://bloomsbury.pub/suspended-god. Heaney argues that music is a universally important means of making sense of life with which theology needs to engage as a means of expression and of development. Musical composition is presented as an appropriate and even necessary form of doing theology in its quest to engage with the past, mediate truth to the present and tradition it into the future.

Although Martin Heidegger is well known for his work on technology, he is not often discussed in the context of science broadly speaking. This volume is the first to showcase diverse perspectives on Heidegger's assessments of the sciences, looking at a number of different ways that Heidegger's writings contribute to questions concerning how we understand the world through science. With particular attention to quantum theory, natural science, technoscience, and a section devoted specifically to investigating what Being and Time has to say about science, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines and traditions. It closes with consideration of questions about sustainability and ethics raised by Heidegger's engagement with the sciences.