Category: David Fleischacker

Talk given at the Lonergan Institute, December 17, 2017 Dr. David Fleischacker Good evening. Next year is the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae.  It has ties to an earlier encyclical facing similar challenges in 1930, Casti Cannubi.  It is not unrelated to our current Pope’s more recent encyclical Amoris...

David Fleischacker, PhD, December 2008 (written 10 years ago) In 1943, Lonergan had written an essay on marriage, love, and finality.[1] In this essay he makes use of metaphysics to develop the intelligibility of marriage and family in such a manner as to provide a systematic understanding of the...

by David Fleischacker Description and Explanation: Mendel’s Pea Plants One good illustration of the dynamic relationship between description and explanation is found in Mendel’s breakthrough into genetics.  Description to recall is articulating how a thing relates to us.  Explanation is relation things to things.  At least that is a...

by David Fleischacker One of the areas that I have found to need further articulation in Lonergan’s writings is that of the scope and the relationship of explanation and description.  Description is rooted in an account of things in relationship to the human motor-sensory operations.  How much of the...

FYI — I will not be posting blogs during this August, 2017....

If you glance through the liturgy of the hours and the divine office, you will notice the frequency that the word light is used.  Of course, it is in the context of prayer, and it is an attribute of Jesus Christ and of all the persons of the Holy...

by David Fleischacker Last night, I met a seminarian who had been reading Saint Augustine’s Confessions and was discussing how much he liked the last section (book 10 and on) on memory, time, and eternity.  It brought to mind some of my own memories about the book and about...

Sorry this is late. I try to get these out as near to 3 pm on Fridays as possible, however yesterday, I was busy with a guest we had the last few days at the University of Mary — Dr. Peter Kreeft.  What a joy he was for all...

By Dr. David Fleischacker [This springs from a series of blogs titled “When does the human being begin to exist?” which I had written starting in December, 2007. I had drafted this piece in 2008, but just now finished it.] Some will argue that an embryo becomes a human...

by David Fleischacker   Method can be looked at as technique. This of course entirely misses the meaning of method as Lonergan conceived of it. For Lonergan, method is a set of heuristic conceptions that morally guide human self-transcendence, and hence are based on the structure of self-transcendence. Historically,...