Hefling's Workshop

The afternoon workshop with Charles Hefling was again very fruitful.

Charles said that sections 3 and 4 (Pluralism in Expression; Pluralism in Religious Language) were probably repetitions, and that a good editor might have pushed Lonergan to correct them.

He brought up a text from Foundations of Theology (1971) where Lonergan explicitly includes the response in what he calls religious experience or religious conversion.

Then again, he said that all three conversions, religious, moral and intellectual, could well be spontaneous before being objectified; or rather, that one does not have to be able to objectify conversions in order to be converted. I objected about intellectual conversion, but he seems to hold that one is normally and naturally intellectually converted, and adduced a text of Lonergan's to the effect that if you know to speak your native language, you are intellectually converted - till you are corrupted by reading certain philosophers. He said that if you are reading Insight, you probably stand in need of a reconversion.

I will have to think more about that!