The Lonergan Workshop

Each year since it began in 1973, the Workshop has explored a particular theme. One Workshop celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Lonergan's Grace and Freedom, a masterpiece that resolves a centuries-long controversy about the roles of God and humankind in the redemption of the world. Another honored two devoted Jesuits, Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran, Lonergan's executors and the general editors of his collected works. There have been Workshops on cultural diversity and transcultural normativity, on mind and the mystery of Christ, on image and feeling, the "language of the heart," on aesthetics, the conditions for political order, spirituality and pastoral ministry, and the crisis of liberal education.

The original idea for the Workshop, though it has not changed, has grown and blossomed. The Workshop now holds weekend conferences as well as the summer event. These "mini-Workshops" have brought to Boston College such eminent speakers as economist Jane Jacobs, theologians David Tracy, Johann Baptist Metz, Sarah Coakley, and Nicholas Lash, philosophers Eric Voegelin, Michael McCarthy, and Jean-Luc Marion, biblical scholars N. T. Wright and Sean McEvenue, and ecclesiologists Joseph Komonchak and Hermann Pottmeyer.

And the Workshop has traveled overseas. Lonergan received his doctorate at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University and later taught there for a dozen years. Very appropriately, it was in Rome that the first international Lonergan Workshop was held in May 2001, helping to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Gregorian, and drawing a crowd of participants from all over the world.

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