The Lonergan Institute at Boston College is the “living memorial” established in 1986 to honor one of BC’s most distinguished teachers, Bernard Lonergan, SJ. We seek to foster a local community of Lonergan scholars by offering Visiting International Fellowships and Graduate Scholarships, and by working with BC faculty to support Lonergan studies and Lonergan's contributions to the BC mission. In addition to this local community, the Institute reaches a global audience through online lectures and workshops, and through regular publishing of our academic journal, Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies.
Events
Programs
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Lonergan Fellows Program
The Lonergan Fellows Program brings together BC Visiting Scholars, both national and international, who specialize in Lonergan Studies with a local community of BC faculty and faculty from other Boston-area institutions. The Fellows meet weekly at Flanagan House to read through each other's work and discuss Lonergan's writings, as well as participate in our public and community events.
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Lonergan M.A. and Doctoral Scholars
The Lonergan Institute sponsors M.A. students in philosophy and theology, as well as select doctoral students in philosophy. Students who receive scholarships from the Lonergan Institute take courses on Lonergan's thought, utlize the resources of the Lonergan Center at Bapst Library, and participate and help with our community and public events. Lonergan Scholars also have the opportunity to get to know our Visiting Scholars, travel to national Lonergan conferences, and engage in wide-ranging discussions on Lonergan's thought around the globe.
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Lonergan G.E.M. Fellows
Inspired by the Praxis Program at Seton Hall, each year the Lonergan Institute recruits a new cohort of G.E.M. Fellows comprised of faculty and administrators from diverse departments at Boston College. Named after Lonergan's Generalized Empirical Method -- a method of appropriation allowing scholars to collaborate accross disciplines, understanding their work as fulfilling a common mission of formation and research within the wider university -- the G.E.M. Fellows meet seven times in the spring semester for two-hour seminar discussions, craft and implement a year long project relating Lonergan's thought and the mission of the university to their own work, and travel to Rome to present their projects to global Lonergan scholars for feedback.
Online Course
Insight and Beyond, a two-semester course given at Boston College by Professor Patrick Byrne of the Philosophy Department, is a comprehensive examination of Bernard Lonergan’s magnum opus, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, as well as certain texts that represent key developments in Lonergan’s thought after the publication of Insight.
“To grasp the contemporary issue and to meet its challenge calls for collective effort. It is not the individual but the group that transforms the culture.”