Empowering Bernard Lonergan's Legacy: Toward Implementing an Ethos for Inquiry and a Global Ethics

Empowering Bernard Lonergan’s Legacy offers an interdisciplinary approach to Lonergan’s work. It presents a series of five “feedback matrices” to situate his work within a historical context. The matrices also serve to establish foundations for an interdisciplinary ethics and a method for interreligious dialogue. “Feedback” and “matrix” are key, but previously unstressed, notions in Lonergan’s work. The book’s final two collaborative feedback matrices could best be implemented in a proposed international Lonergan association. Raymaker argues that without such an association, Lonergan’s breakthrough method cannot reach its interdisciplinary and collaborative potential. One of Lonergan’s most important achievements was his development of foundations for the sciences, ethics, and interreligious dialogue. One can best empower Lonergan’s legacy through a correct understanding and implementation of how the data of human consciousness affects all human knowledge and activities.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Foreword By Philip McShane Introduction xv Part I Historical And Intercultural Backgrounds Lonergan’s Notions of “Matrix” and “Feedback” Chapter 1 Generalized Empirical Method (GEM) as Possible “Feedback Matrices” First Historical Feedback Matrix: Situating GEM’s Mediating, Transformative Roles Chapter 2 Two Further Feedback Matrices: Historical Implications Metaphysical Equivalence and the Limitations of Various Analyses A Second Historical Feedback Matrix: How Lonergan (GEM) Goes Beyond Aquinas Third Historical Feedback Matrix: How Lonergan (GEM) Reconciles Galileo, Pascal, and Einstein Part II An Ethically Empowering Foreground Coordinating Lonergan’s Legacy Chapter 3 Transitional Issues in Evaluating Holistic-GEM-FS Collaboration Chapter 4 Implementing the Functional Specialties in Two Phases Fourth GEM-Fs Feedback Matrix: Functional Collaboration And Grounding Ethics A First Complementarity-Dialectical Phase: Grounding GEM Operations Transition to Fig. 3b’s Second Cooperative Dialectical Phase Chapter 5 Fifth Feedback Matrix: A Structured IGEMA Operating as a Collaborative FS Feedback Matrix to Implement the Human Good Conclusion Appendix I: GEM-Buddhist Dialectical Foundations Appendix II: GEM Economics Appendix III: Feedback Matrices’ Transformative Roles and Mathematical Analogies Index

About the Author :
John Raymaker has lived and worked in the United States, Japan, Belgium, and Germany. He earned his Ph.D. in interdisciplinary social ethics at Marquette University in 1977. He has studied Buddhism for over twenty-five years and has published multiple articles and books on encounters between the major world religions.

Review :
Raymaker’s command of the Lonergan corpus is clear. . . .It is definitely a rewarding read. Various contemporary books and movements, especially in ecology, point us towards the need for structures of action. . . . Raymaker has a precise ethical and intellectual perspective to offer.