with Prof. John Haughey, SJ / McGuinn Hall 121

Thesis advisor: Frederick Lawrence / This work argues that religious conversion sublates moral conversion and also, de facto, serves as a necessary foundation for moral conversion. Religious conversion acts this way by transforming the religiously converted subject's feelings. Through this radical change in the subject's motivation, and the consequent change in the kinds of meanings that constitute the subject, religious conversion also transforms the nature of the human good of which the subject is a part. It thereby provides the basis for the right ordering of the human good toward transcendent value and a supernatural end. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Frederick Lawrence / The first chapter begins by delineating Lonergan’s philosophy of development. It then applies this philosophy to a range of literature on grace and discerns, in the historical data, a basic line of intellectual progress. For this reason, this chapter implements a genetic method. More specifically, the chapter proposes an explanatory framework for understanding the contemporary transposition of scholastic metaphysics. Special attention is placed on the notion of grace as experience in relation to the evolution of theology as a science. The first chapter implements a genetic method to chart the developments in the history of the theology of grace. The last section of that chapter sketches the basic contours of a development that enabled a transposition from the second to the third stage of meaning—a development that made possible a description of grace in terms of consciousness. The second chapter addresses the question of grace and consciousness in the context of Lonergan’s thought. In this chapter, I bring to light the complexities and challenges of identifying and describing grace as a datum of human experience. I also attempt to offer the Lonergan scholar some guidance by developing a set of normative criteria that will assist him in navigating these complexities and surmounting these challenges. The chapter is not an exercise in foundational theology but is written from a dialectical and methodological viewpoint. The dialectical and methodological work of the second chapter will prepare for the task of the third chapter. Chapter three compares Rahner’s and Lonergan’s theologies of grace; it focuses on a comparison of Lonergan’s notion of ‘being-in-love unrestrictedly’ and Rahner’s notion of the ‘supernatural existential’ in order to clarify their respective positions and to demonstrate an affinity in their writings on grace. Chapter four uses Rahner’s and Lonergan’s account of grace in terms of experience, developed in chapter three, to work out a theology of religion that responds to the challenges posed by post-modernism. My thesis in chapter four is that Rahner’s and Lonergan’s theologies of grace can ground the notion of a common consciousness of grace and take seriously the claim of a genuine variety of religious experiences. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Diss. phil.-hist. Bern (kein Austausch). / Literaturverz. S. 174-181.

Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / In this dissertation, I attempt to contribute to Lonergan scholarship by bringing greater clarity to his notions of general and group bias. By applying these notions to a concrete event, the subprime mortgage crisis, I intend to shed light on their meaning and significance in a new way. Over the course of this dissertation, I will investigate and employ other theoretical tools that Lonergan provides, such as his notions of transcendental method, self-appropriation, common sense, and values, and especially the destructive impact of group and general bias upon the good of order. The theoretical ideas that are examined in this dissertation have a heuristic value, for they have the potential to help individuals notice areas and respond to issues that might have otherwise been overlooked. The subprime mortgage crisis, which arguably began when American house prices dropped in July of 2006, was the product of an accumulation of biased decisions over time. Lonergan's notion of the general bias of common sense afflicted many of the central parties involved in the subprime mortgage market leading up to the crisis, prompting them to conclude that house prices would interminably rise. Institutional relationships that were impaired by this biased orientation toward the housing market came to be further plagued by Lonergan's notion of group bias. Ultimately, I argue that subprime mortgage crisis was a manifestation of a breakdown in the good of order, which is a component of Lonergan's notion of the invariant structure of the human good. Chapter One consists of a presentation and explication of the set of Lonergan's theoretical tools that are utilized in this study. The chapter begins with an exploration of his transcendental method and then proceeds with a discussion that includes his notions of cognitional structure, self-appropriation, common sense, values and judgments of value, conversion, self-transcendence, authenticity, bias, and the invariant structure of the human good. Chapter Two serves a bridge between these theoretical terms and my analysis of the parties that were involved in the subprime mortgage crisis. In addition to arguing that the general bias of common sense distorted the decision making processes of many of the significant players in the subprime mortgage market, I will also contend that group bias was operative leading up to and during this crisis. The emphasis in this latter section will be on instances of "co-opted" group bias, or arrangements in which different parties cooperated with one another in mutually advantageous ways in the short-term, but to the detriment of the good of order. Chapters Three through Six each focus on one of the parties that played an instrumental role in the development and outbreak of the subprime mortgage crisis: subprime lenders (Chapter Three), arrangers (Chapter Four), credit rating agencies (Chapter Five), and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Chapter Six). I examine key regulatory relationships in these chapters as well and note that, in many cases, they were ensnared by general and group bias. My concluding analysis is that, as an accumulation of biased decisions, the subprime mortgage crisis was an avoidable outcome, for individual submission to bias is not inevitable. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Patrick H. Byrne / This dissertation assesses the relevance and significance of Lonergan’s work to feminist philosophy. In particular, this work examines the debate between several contemporary feminist philosophers regarding the question of the relation between sex and gender, as well as their critiques of the Western metaphysical tradition. Ultimately, the trajectory of the work argues that Lonergan’s philosophy, in particular his re-envisioning of the meaning of what it is to do metaphysics, provides a unique and compelling response to the critiques made by feminist philosophers, despite the appearance of overt sexism in his writing. In fact, Lonergan’s approach clarifies the relevance of metaphysical thinking to feminist philosophical analysis. The first chapter examines likely feminist criticisms of Lonergan’s philosophy, as well as points of commonality, particularly between Lonergan’s cognitional theory and various feminist epistemologies. In particular, this chapter undertakes an analysis of Lonergan’s notion of “the pure desire to know” which he claims is a primordial, normative human response to our experience of the universe of being. Chapter Two focuses on the feminist debate regarding the “sex/gender” distinction. This chapter examines the analyses of sex and gender by four prominent feminist philosophers, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens, and Judith Butler, and their critiques of the Western metaphysical tradition. Chapter Three explicates Lonergan’s cognitional theory, as well as his analysis of four patterns of experience – the biological, aesthetic, intellectual and dramatic. In addition, the notion of “neural demands” developed by Lonergan is discussed, as well as the connection between “neural demand functions” and patterns of experience. Chapter Four is dedicated to an exploration of the complexity of Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics. The chapter begins with Lonergan’s notion of being, and moves on to explore his notions of finality, emergent probability and objectivity. I turn next to a discussion of Lonergan’s revision of the traditional metaphysical vocabulary of potency, form, and act. This is followed by an examination of Lonergan’s understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and development, as well as dialectic. Chapter Five elaborates a dialectical exchange between Lonergan’s philosophy and the philosophy of Irigaray, Grosz, Butler, and Gatens. In addition, this chapter articulates Lonergan’s notion of anti-essentialism, and argues that his unmistakably clear rejection of essentialism supports the repudiation of the idea that human natures are fixed and determined by biological sex. In addition, Chapter Five explores the metaphysical and ethical significance of classical and statistical law, as well as the relationship between metaphysics and ethics as it pertains to feminist philosophy. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / This dissertation, an exercise in interpretation, is on Bernard Lonergan’s notion of faith as expressed in his early Latin theological writings—especially his scholastic supplement Analysis Fidei (1952). This interpretation consists largely of an analysis of the intellectual horizon in which Lonergan did his earliest thinking on faith; without a grasp of this horizon Lonergan’s early, especially scholastic notion of faith is almost overwhelmingly difficult to understand. The horizon analysis is completed in the first four chapters of the dissertation. Chapter One aims to show that Lonergan’s analysis of faith is rooted in the theological context informed by the decrees of Vatican I (especially Dei Filius) and its focus on the question about the relation of faith to reason, and by the effort especially in Catholic theological circles of the time to mine the works of Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor of the Church, for a deeper understanding of the revealed mysteries. Chapter Two situates Lonergan’s notion of faith in his understanding of a developing world-order; coming to faith is understood as a part of a larger process that, on the one hand, begins with a natural desire to see God (a natural desire to understand everything about everything) and, on the other, terminates in the absolutely supernatural goal of beatific knowledge: knowing God as God. Chapter Three narrows the scope and situates the act and virtue of faith in Lonergan’s rigorously systematic theology of grace that distinguishes clearly between grace as operative and cooperative on the one hand, and actual and habitual on the other. Chapter Four offers a very brief sketch of Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the notion of faith, from which Lonergan’s own work takes its bearings. After this horizon analysis, Chapter Five offers an exposition of Lonergan’s own treatment of the notion of faith as found in his early Latin theology. The chapter investigates three principal sources, giving most attention to the third: first, the Gratia Operans dissertation (1940) together with the Grace and Freedom articles (1941–42); second, De Ente Supernatural (1946); and third, Analysis Fidei (1952). The chapter claims that Lonergan’s early presentation of faith breaks new ground by bringing into view, alongside a logical analysis of the act of faith, the psychological dimension of the conscious process of coming to believe revealed mysteries. Finally, a brief concluding chapter looks ahead to Lonergan’s later understanding of faith in Method in Theology (1972) in order to indicate some of the challenges that would need to be met in a full-scale treatment of the development of Lonergan’s notion of faith throughout his entire intellectual career—a project for which this dissertation can serve as a perhaps helpful prolegomena. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Frederick G. Lawrence / This dissertation offers a critical response to the fundamental sacramental theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet drawing on the works of Bernard Lonergan. Chauvet has articulated a significant critique of the western theological tradition's use of metaphysics, especially in interpreting doctrines relating to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, liturgical sacrifice, and sacramental causality. Chauvet's criticisms raise questions about what philosophical tools allow theologians to develop a fruitful analogical understanding of the mysteries communicated in the sacraments. This dissertation responds to Chauvet's challenge to theology to adopt a new foundation in the symbolic by turning to the derived, critical metaphysics of Bernard Lonergan. The dissertation argues that Lonergan's critical metaphysics can help theologians to develop fruitful understandings of doctrines relating to Eucharistic presence, liturgical sacrifice, and sacramental causality. In addition Lonergan's categories of meaning offer resources for interpreting sacramental doctrines on the level of the time, while maintaining the genuine achievements of the past. Chapter one presents a survey of some recent Catholic Eucharistic theologies in order to provide a context for our investigation. Here we identify existentialist-phenomenological, postmodern, and neo-traditionalist approaches to Eucharistic doctrines. Chapters two, three, and four present a dialectical comparison of Chauvet and Lonergan on metaphysics as it pertains to Eucharistic theology specifically. Chapter two examines Chauvet's postmodern critique of metaphysical foundations of scholastic Eucharistic theology. Our particular concern will be with Chauvet's methods, especially whether his appropriation of the Heideggerian critique of scholastic theology offers an accurate account of Thomas Aquinas, and whether it offers a fruitful way forward in Eucharistic theology. Chapter three explores Lonergan's foundations for metaphysics in cognitional theory and epistemology. Lonergan's critical groundwork in cognitional theory attends to the problems of bias and the polymorphism of human consciousness that lead to a heuristic metaphysics rather than a tidy conceptual system. Chapter four explicates Lonergan's heuristic metaphysics and articulates the elements of metaphysics that enable an understanding of the general category of causality in critical realist metaphysics. Chapter five explores Lonergan's foundations for theological reflection paying particular attention to the importance of intellectual conversion before going on to survey Lonergan's categories of meaning. Chapter six engages the task of systematic theology and proposes an understanding of Eucharistic doctrines grounded in Lonergan's critical realist philosophy and transposed into categories of meaning. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: Thomas H. Groome / There has been spirited debate regarding the identity of Catholic colleges and universities in America in the fifty years following the Second Vatican Council. The tension of continuity and change was a crucial theme informing the Council, and it echoed throughout Catholic higher education. The development of Catholic higher education in the twentieth century exhibited a dialectic of cultural assimilation to American society, including the prevalent values and practices of its prized educational institutions, and retention of an identity reflecting commitments distinct from its host culture. Moreover, in recent years there has been a sharp decline in the number of priests and nuns on Catholic campuses; their presence once served as an easily identifiable and external marker of Catholic identity. These factors, among others, have contributed to the ongoing conversation regarding the role of the Catholic university in the world today. This conversation unfolds within the larger milieu of the American academy, which is characterized by the hyper-specialization of academic disciplines, the so-called fact/value dichotomy, and the commodification of education. Concerns that animated Blessed John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University during the nineteenth century persist in our day. Today the lively discussion includes many questions. What is the purpose of Catholic higher education and how is it distinct from secular higher education? What is the relation of Catholic theology to modern/post-modern thought and culture? What is the relation of theology to other academic disciplines at a Catholic university? What is the relevance of Catholic spirituality and its lived practices for the academic mission of Catholic higher education? How should the Catholic university relate to the magisterium? What is the role of doctrinal or ethical dissent in Catholic higher education? Do Catholic universities hold the same understanding of academic freedom as secular American universities? In sum, what does the adjective “Catholic” mean when applied to American higher education today, and what are the implications for the various facets of university life? This dissertation wades into these choppy waters by proposing an organizing vision of Catholic higher education rooted in Trinitarian friendship. Bernard Lonergan, S.J., provides a remarkable account of the synthesis of faith and reason – the logos of Athens with the heart of Jerusalem. His integral hermeneutics is fertile ground in the Catholic university’s quest for self-understanding. Lonergan transposed Thomas Aquinas by integrating theology with modern science and historical studies so that it can mount to the level of our times. He thus realized Pope Leo XIII’s program of augmenting and perfecting the old in light of the new. This dissertation plunges the riches of Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology and hermeneutics in order to propose a vision of Catholic higher education permeated by friendship. The thesis is that Lonergan’s integral hermeneutics – the mutual mediation of the ways “below upwards” and “above downwards” – provides a promising heuristic for the Catholic university’s self-understanding as a participation in the coordinated missions of the Son and the Spirit and therefore sharing in the life of the triune God – by exercising friendship. Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology developed the distinct and cumulative Augustinian-Thomistic tradition with deepened understanding of the psychological analogy and bestows upon the processions an ethical-existential import and heightens the role of divine intersubjectivity. Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology culminates in an analogy of the divine persons as a community of friends: three distinct eternal subjects in perfect friendship. In perfect friendship, they are completely bound together as “another self.” As the analogy of intelligible emanation elucidates, the divine persons are distinct in how they are in relation to one another. The immanent constitution of life in God is integrally related to God’s engagement in history because the divine missions are constituted by the processions of divine persons as bringing about consequent created terms (the hypostatic union and sanctifying grace) that enable human beings to share in the relationships among those divine persons in a new way. The divine missions, the sending of the Word and the Spirit into history, establish new interpersonal relations – friendships – with creation. Lonergan understands the mission of the Word in terms of friendship, specifically how friendship is perfectly expressed in the redemption achieved through Christ’s enacting of the gracious “Law of the Cross.” “For no love is greater than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Lonergan’s account of existential interiority progressed a theological understanding of the “invisible” mission of the Spirit as distinct and coordinated with the “visible” mission of the Word. Through friendship with God, a gift of the Holy Spirit, we are related to God as God is related to God. The missions of the Word and the Spirit enable our assimilation to the divine relations of friendship. Lonergan thus sheds light on Jesus’ extraordinary claim: “ I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). Lonergan’s integral hermeneutics is comprised by the mutual mediation of the vectors “below upwards” and “above downwards” in human development. In development “below upwards,” wonder drives the human subject from experiencing through understanding and onwards to judgment of values and loving commitment. Development “above downwards” originates in the dynamic state of being-in-love and cascades from judgment of values to understanding that colors experiencing. That Lonergan identified the extroverted, visible mission of the Word with development “below upwards” and the introverted, invisible mission of the Spirit with development “above downwards” is the basis for identifying his hermeneutics in terms of friendship. Thomas Groome’s renowned shared Christian praxis approach to religious education provides a pedagogical enactment of Lonergan’s integral hermeneutics. Groome has traced the correspondence between the five movements of shared Christian praxis and Lonergan’s philosophy of cognitional interiority. Shared Christian praxis may also be understood as a pedagogy of friendship because it invites friendship with oneself, the Christian Story/Vision, and the other participants throughout its five movements. Shared Christian praxis is a way of education that enables a community of learners to exercise their friendship with God. A pedagogy of friendship is epitomized in Christ’s journeying with the two on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). Shared Christian praxis may be summarized as a life to faith to (new) life in faith approach. This dissertation is organized accordingly. Friendship has universal practical meaning in people’s lives and is profoundly significant in the process of education. Conversation, the option for the poor, and worship are three practices whereby a Catholic university may exercise its friendship with God. In each case, friendship’s benevolentia heals wonder “above downwards” from its contraction and atrophy by supplanting concupiscence with love. God has offered us divine friendship in the outer Word made flesh in Christ Jesus and the inner word of love poured out in our hearts by the Spirit who has been given to us by the Father and the Son. Our friendships with one another and with God is wonder therapy and therefore completely integral to the intellectual formation at a Catholic university in our time. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry.

Thesis advisor: Frederick Lawrence / This dissertation aims at understanding Bernard Lonergan’s understanding of how the passion of Jesus Christ is salvific. Because salvation is of human persons in a community, a history, and a cosmos, the first part of the dissertation examines Lonergan’s cosmology with an emphasis on his anthropology. For Lonergan the cosmos is a dynamic, interrelated hierarchy governed by the processes of what he calls “emergent probability.” Within the universe of emergent probability, humanity is given the ability to direct world processes with critical intelligence, freedom, love, and cooperation with each other and with the larger world order. This ability is not totally undirected. Rather, it has a natural orientation, a desire or eros for ultimate goodness, truth, beauty, and love, i.e. for God. When made effective through an authentic, recurrent cycle of experience, questioning, understanding, judgment, decision, action, and cooperation, this human desire for God results in progress. However, when this cycle is damaged by bias, sin and its evil consequences distort the order of creation, both in human persons and in the larger environment. Over time, the effects of sin and bias produce cumulative, self-feeding patterns of destruction, or decline. In answer to this distortion, God gives humanity the gift of grace. Grace heals and elevates human persons. Through the self-gift of divine, unrestricted Love and the Incarnate Word, God works with human sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, affect, freedom, and community to produce religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, and to form the renewed, renewing community Lonergan calls “cosmopolis” and the body of Christ. Building on this cosmology and anthropology, the second part of the dissertation turns to the culmination of God’s solution to the problem of sin and evil in the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, on the cross at Calvary. The cross does not redeem creation by destroying its order, nor does it redeem humanity by revoking its freedom. Rather, the cross redeems the world by working with the order and freedom of creation and humanity to fulfill their natural processes and purposes. Just as from all possible world orders, God chose the order of emergent probability and human freedom, from all possible ways of redeeming that order, God chose the way of the cross. How does the cross redeem a free humanity in a world of emergent probability? For Lonergan, the best way to understand the cross is through the analogy of communication. This communication is in two parts. First, the cross is a communication, primarily, of humanity to God. Lonergan calls this part “vicarious satisfaction.” He takes the general analogy from Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo?. But rather than understanding satisfaction primarily in an economic context of debt (as Anselm does), Lonergan situates it in the higher context of interpersonal psychology: Sin creates a rupture in the relationships between human persons and God, among human persons, and among all parts of creation. Christ’s vicarious satisfaction flows from a non-ruptured relationship. It expresses a perfect concord of the human and the divine, through its threefold communication of (1) a perfect knowledge and love of God and humanity, (2) a perfect knowledge and sorrow for the offense that sin is, (3) and a perfect knowledge and detestation of the evil sin causes. Conceived as a communication in the context of ruptured interpersonal relationships, Lonergan’s analogical understanding of the cross as vicarious satisfaction avoids Anselm’s understanding’s tendency to be misinterpreted as “satispassion” or “substitutionary penal atonement.” The other major part to Lonergan’s analogy of the cross as communication is called the “Law of the Cross.” While vicarious satisfaction is mainly Christ’s achievement prescinding from the cooperation of human freedom in a world of emergent probability, the Law of the Cross proposes that Christ’s crucifixion is an example and an exhortation to human persons. On the cross, Jesus wisely and lovingly transforms the evil consequences of sin into a twofold communication to humanity of a perfect human and divine (1) knowledge and love for humanity and (2) knowledge and condemnation of sin and evil. This twofold communication invites a twofold human response: the repentance of sin and a love for God and all things. This love and repentance form a reconciled relationship of God and humanity. Furthermore, when reconciled with God, a human person will tend to be moved to participate in Christ’s work by willingly taking on satisfaction for one’s own sin as well as the vicarious satisfaction for others’ sins. Such participatory vicarious activity invites still other human persons to repent and reconcile with God and other persons, and furthermore to engage in their own participatory acts of satisfaction and communication. Thus, Christ’s own work and human participation in his work are objective achievements as well as moving or inspiring examples. However, while Christ’s work and our participation are moving, their movements do not operate by necessity. Nor are the appropriate human responses of repentance, love, personal satisfaction, and vicarious satisfaction in any way forced upon human persons. Consequently, the cross as communication operates in harmony with a world of emergent probability and in cooperation with human freedom. With the cross as communication, redemption is reconciliation, a reconciliation that spreads historically and communally by human participation in the divine initiative. This is God’s solution to the problem of evil, according to Lonergan. Because God wills ultimately for human persons to be united to God and to all things by love, God wills freedom, and God allows the possibility of sin and evil. But sin and evil do not please God. Out of infinite wisdom, God did not do away with evil through power, but converted evil into a communication that preserves, works with, and fulfills the order of creation and the freedom of humanity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.