The Los Angeles Lonergan Center

Preserving the Catholic and Jesuit Intellectual Tradition in the 21st Century

The Los Angeles Lonergan Center was founded in 1995 by Catholic scholars at Loyola Marymount University with the aim of preserving the Catholic and Jesuit intellectual tradition. Its original focus was the promotion of the work of Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J. in the areas of methodology, philosophy, theology, and economics.

In its current iteration, the mission of the Los Angeles Lonergan Center is the study and teaching of the fullness of the Catholic intellectual, spiritual, and cultural tradition. It seeks to live out its mission by inviting students to explore this tradition through classes and discussions, by working as a patron of scholarship through hosting lectures and organizing faculty colloquia leading to scholarly publications, and by serving the Society of Jesus and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. From its inception, the Lonergan Center has been the common work of both lay and Jesuit scholars, and it seeks to continue this collaboration to the greater glory of God. 

“Rightly then is philosophy called the science of truth.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 993b 20.

“No desire leads so high as the desire to understand the truth. For all our other desires, whether of delight or anything else that is desired by man, can come to rest in other things. However, the aforementioned desire does not come to rest until it reaches God, the supreme foundation and maker of all things."
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, Book III, Ch. 50. 

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
John 14:6

“The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode. The person who aims after art in his work aims after truth, in an imaginative sense, no more and no less.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”