In order to make Lonergan's unique contribution to philosophy and theology accessible to students and teachers, the editors of The Lonergan Reader have brought together in a single volume selections that represent the depth and breadth of his thought.

Introduces teachers and students to the difficult subject of self-knowledge and provides readers with a transcultural, normative foundation for a critical evaluation of self-identity and cultural identity.

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.

In Deference to the Other brings contemporary continental thought into conversation with that of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), the Jesuit philosopher and theologian. This is an opportune moment to open such a dialogue: philosophers and theologians indebted to Lonergan have increasingly found themselves challenged by the insights of thinkers typically dubbed "postmodern," while postmodernists, most notably Jacques Derrida, have begun to ask the "God question." While Lonergan was not a continental philosopher, neither was he an analytic philosopher. Concerned with both epistemology and cognition, his systematic and hermeneutic-like proposals resonate with the concerns of philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and Kristeva. Contributors to this volume find insight and affiliation between Lonergan's thought and contemporary continental thought in a wide-ranging work that engages the philosophical problems of authenticity, self-appropriation, ethics, and the human subject.

"Bernard Lonergan's insight, one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century, is a challenging book for any reader. Bernard Lonergan: An Introductory Guide to Insight provides readers with a first reading guide, emphasizing what is truly essential and central to Lonergan's work. It allows readers to make their way through a first reading by providing a summary of each chapter and questions for reflection."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Bernard Lonergan's ambitious study of human knowledge, based on his theory of consciousness, is among the major achievements of twentieth-century philosophy. He challenges the principles of contemporary intellectual culture by finding norms and standards not in external perceptions or reified concepts, but in the dynamism of consciousness itself.

It’s frequently said that we live in a “post-truth” age. That obviously can’t be true, but it does name a real problem on our hands. Getting things right is hard, especially if they’re complicated. It takes preparation, diligence, and honesty. Wisdom, according to Thomas Aquinas, is the quality of right judgment. This book is about the problem of becoming wise, the problem “before truth.” It is about that problem particularly as it comes up for religious, philosophical, and theological truth claims. Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom proposes that Bernard Lonergan’s approach to these problems can help us become wise. One of the special problems facing Christian believers today is our awareness of how much our tradition has developed. This development has occurred along a path shot through with contingencies. Theologians have to be able to articulate how and why doctrines, institutions, and practices that have developed—and are still developing—should nevertheless be worthy of our assent and devotion.

Lonergan scholar Frederick Crowe once noted that the topic of Bernard Lonergan and liberation theology can seem like Melchizedek, that is, without either contextual father or mother. The same, of course, goes for Lonergan and the Preferential Option for the Poor. This book argues that Lonergan's work offers a highly cogent and powerful method for integrating the Option for the Poor into systematic theology.

In The Ethics of Discernment, Patrick H. Byrne presents an approach to ethics that builds upon the cognitional theory and the philosophical method of self-appropriation that Bernard Lonergan introduced in his book Insight, as well as upon Lonergan’s later writing on ethics and values. Extending Lonergan’s method into the realm of ethics, Byrne argues that we can use self-appropriation to come to objective judgements of value. The Ethics of Discernment is an introspective analysis of that process, in which sustained ethical inquiry and attentiveness to feelings as “intentions of value” leads to a rich conception of the good. Written both for those with an interest in Lonergan’s philosophy and for those interested in theories of ethics who have only a limited knowledge of Lonergan’s work, Byrne’s book is the first detailed exposition of an ethical theory based on Lonergan’s philosophical method.

Bernard Lonergan was a mid 20th century Canadian philosopher and theologian. This book aims to help form a basis for inquiry into Lonergan's achievement in his new approach to the great philosophical questions: what do I do when I know something? (cognitional theory), why is doing that 'knowing'? (epistemology) and what do I know when I do that? (metaphysics).Lonergan deals with these questions somewhat more deeply in his major works, Insight (1957, 1992) and Method in Theology (1972, 2017). Here he invites one to discover in oneself the dynamic structure of one's own cognitional and moral being and in doing this, one finds an operative procedure that is not open to radical revision. In fact, Lonergan has unearthed a dynamic, conscious framework for creativity, a method that grounds all investigation that is intelligent and critical. It is a resource that is transcendental in that it is the concrete and dynamic unfolding of human attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness and responsibility, and this unfolding occurs whenever one uses one's mind in an appropriate fashion.This method, for investigators too, is new in its finding eight tasks that are distinct and separable stages in the single process from data to results and can be adapted to any subject in which investigations are responding to past history and are to influence future history.