Creativity and Method: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan

Marquette University celebrated Reverend Bernard Lonergans seventy-fifth birthday with a symposium during the final week of April 1980. It was opened with an invocation by Most Reverend Rembert G. Weakland, Archbishop of Milwaukee, and a presentation to Lonergan by the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Reverend Frederick Dillemuth, of a pre-publication copy of this volume of thirty-four essays. Reverend Frederick Crowe then delivered the Pere Marquette Lecture on the significance of Lonergan Method in Theology as a profound challenge to restructure the ways in which theology is done. Eight other lectures -- included in this volume -- were offered during the symposium by Patrick Byrne, Robert Doran, Tad Dunne, Vernon Gregson, Joseph Komonchak, Frederick Lawrence, William Loewe, and Philip McShane. In so honoring Bernard Lonergan, Marquette University wished to acknowledge publicly the creative contributions he has made to human culture and religious thought. From his earliest research efforts onwards, Lonergan has been engaged in exploring the sources of human creativity. These he recognized in the restless questioning of human intelligence and in the ceaseless questing of the human heart. Inspired by the great Christian traditions associated with Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Lonergan has sought to charter for our times, as they had for theirs, how human minds and hearts are not isolated faculties lost in a vast cosmic loneliness but are ultimately orientations towards Infinite Intelligence and Infinite Love.