The period during which Bernard Lonergan delivered the eleven lectures in this volume was one of important transition for him: he was moving rapidly toward a new conception of theology and its method; and he was on the verge of what is now recognized as a major breakthrough in his thought on method, the idea that came to him in February 1965 of the eight functional specialities. While the lectures maintain a continuity with Lonergan's previous work, they also reveal new and significant ideas, especially in regard to his drive toward a new conception of theology as a whole, and his particular concern for the relevance of theology to the spiritual life. The lectures here include `The Redemption,' `Method in Catholic Theology,' `The Philosophy of History,' `The Origins of Christian Realism,' `Time and Meaning,' `Consciousness and the Trinity,' `Exegesis and Dogma,' `The Mediation of Christ in Prayer,' `The Analogy of Meaning,' `Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,' and `Theology as Christian Phenomenon.' This volume provides a key to understanding the development of Lonergan's philosophical and theological thought, his major influences, and the pivotal moments of transition in the road leading up to Method in Theology and beyond.

This anthology contains Lonergan's lectures on philosophy and theology given during the later period of his life, 1965-1980, and document his development in the discipline during the years leading up to the publication of Method in Theology, and beyond to 1980.

This third and final collection of articles by the noted Lonergan expert Frederick E. Crowe comprises twenty-eight papers written between 1961 and 2004, five of which have never before been published. --

Thematically focused on the theology of redemption or what is called in theology "soteriology," each of the two sections of The Redemption addresses biblical literature and significant moments in the history of Christian theology, and especially the work of Anselm of Canterbury. The second part of the book presents a significant treatment of the problem of good and evil, and introduces the important category of cultural evil. Most significant from the standpoint of Lonergan's original contribution is the treatment accorded in both Part 1 and Part 2 to what he calls "the just and mysterious law of the cross." The treatment of biblical literature contains a valuable distinction between "redemption as end" and "redemption as medium." Beginning with theses 15-17 from Lonergan's Collected Works, The Incarnate Word, this volume also includes rare and never-before-published texts originally written in the late 1950s.

"The conversation between music and theology, dormant for too long in recent years, is at last gathering pace. And rightly so. There will always be theologians who will regard music as a somewhat peripheral concern, too trivial to trouble the serious scholar, and in any case almost impossible to engage because of its notorious resistance to words and concepts. But an increasing number are discovering again what many of our forbears realized centuries ago, that the kinship between this pervasive feature of human life and the search for a Christian 'intelligence of faith' is intimate and ineradicable. Maeve Heaney's ambitious, wide-ranging, and energetic book pushes the conversation further forward still. Her approach is unapologetically theological, grounded in the passions and concerns of mainstream doctrinal theology. And yet she is insisting . . . that music must be given its due place in the ecology of theology. Although convinced that music should not be set up as a rival to linguistic or conceptual articulation, let alone swallow up 'traditional' modes of theological language and thought, she is equally convinced that music is an irreducible means of coming to terms with the world, a unique vehicle of world-disclosure, and as such, can generate a particular form of 'understanding': 'there are things which God may only be saying through music.' If this is so, it is incumbent on the theologian to listen." --Jeremy Begbie, from the Foreword

The process of human transformation is complex and ongoing. This book presents a framework for understanding human transformation through the insights of Bernard Lonergan. The reader will be introduced to terms such as the turn to the subject, consciousness, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. It will explore terms such as horizon, feelings, values, self-esteem, sublation, conversion, dialectic, and religious experience. The book explores transformation through the way mentors have authored their own lives, told their own stories, and taken possession of their interiority. Transformation is illustrated through the lives of saints and ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things, such as St. Augustine, Dag Hammarskjold, Vaclav Havel, Franz Jaggerstatter, St. Therese of Lisieux, Fredrich Nietzsche, Katherine Ann Power, and Marie Cardinal. Transformation is also illustrated through the medium of cinema: Babette’s Feast, The Mission, As It is in Heaven, Romero, Dead Poets Society, Ordinary People, The Godfather trilogy, Three Color trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dial M for Murder, and Twelve Angry Men. While the book treats religious, moral, affective, intellectual, and psychic conversion as moments of transformation, it argues that ecological conversion requires all of these so as to meet the most serious moral challenge of our time.

Using the Thomist notion of wisdom as a key for interpretation, Coelho traces the flowering of the universal viewpoint into a mature theological method ? one that holds out the hope of an effective transcultural mediation of meanings and values.

In The Relevance of Bernard Lonergan's Notion of Self-Appropriation to a Mystical-Political Theology, Ian Bell takes on the issue of the separation of the interior and exterior lives that has come to dominate mystical theology over the years. The mystical life, he claims, is necessarily involved in the establishment of social structures and institutions that govern human living, and the work of Bernard Lonergan on the human subject provides a means by which the connection between the interior and exterior lives may be established. Because human persons operate in a consistent pattern regardless of a given moment's particularities, mystical experience is no longer relegated to so-called spiritual matters, and the insights of mystics may be applied to the Christian call to live as agents of love. With this connection in place, mystical theology and political theology come together in a theology that is both mystical and political.

Andrew Beards shows how Lonergan's philosophy can help to clarify not only particular issues in current debates but also the larger question of a basic method.