Bio: Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan
"Bernard J.F. Lonergan was born on 17 December 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada. In 1922, after four years at Loyola College, Montreal, he entered the Society of Jesus in Guelph, Ontario. From 1926 to 1930 he studied philosophy, languages, and mathematics at Heythrop College and the University of London, England.

His four years of theological studies as required by the Jesuits were done at the Gregorian University, Rome, from 1933 to 1937. He added two years of doctoral studies in theology at the Gregorian, and began teaching theology at Collège de l'Immaculée Conception in Montreal in 1940. He taught at the Jesuit Seminary in Toronto from 1947 to 1953, and then at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1965. His first great book, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, was published in 1957.

From 1965 to 1975 he was Professor of Theology at Regis College, Toronto, and in 1972 published the long-awaited Method in Theology. He was the Stillman Professor at Harvard University in 1971-1972, and in 1975 became Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theology at Boston College.

He returned to Canada in late 1983 and died at the Jesuit Infirmary, Pickering, on 26 November 1984."

Bernard Lonergan Archive - Biography

"Bernard Lonergan, S.J., often referred to as the most significant philosophical thinker of the twentieth century, finished his intellectual apostolate as Distinguished Professor of Theology at Boston College, where Lonergan studies were already flourishing. Today, decades later, they continue to flourish, as B.C. is acknowledged worldwide as a focus for the ever-growing interest in this remarkable scholar and his seminal works.
As Newsweek magazine wrote, Lonergan, 'with that boldness characteristic of genius … set out to do for the twentieth century what even Aquinas could not do for the thirteenth: provide an 'understanding of understanding' that can illuminate not only the broad outlines of all accumulated knowledge but also reveal an 'invariant pattern' for further developments in human understanding.' Thus his significance for the twenty-first century lies deeper than the standard categories of the academy, in something more basic. He investigated the character of the inquiring intelligence that is the source and norm of every philosophy, every theology, and every other kind of human knowing."

Bernard Lonergan, S.J., biography - Lonergan Institute at Boston College