Lonergan Centre at the Gregorian

At the Workshop are Padre Natalino Spaccapelo, SJ, one of the great Lonergan scholars of Italy, and Luca Sinibaldi, Archivist of the newly opened Lonergan Centre at the Gregorian. Luca tells me that they have a tiny room, and that they are slowly trying to acquire the primary and secondary sources so as to make them available to scholars. What about the Lonergan Centre at the North American College nearby, I asked. I don't know, he said.

I faintly recollect that they had disbanded the room and integrated the books into the main library of the N.A. College. Pity. It was a great resource to have around. And the sister in charge was really very helpful.

In the meantime, the translation of the Collected Works is going on. Insight is out, and so is Topics in Education, Collection, I think, and Method in Theology. Insight has been freshly translated for the Opera Omnia. Vol. 21 on the economics has been stalled because P. Spaccapelo is not satisfied with the translation. However, a set of essays on economics is due to be released soon, edited by Spaccapelo, Fred Lawrence and Tomasi, a young Italian Lonergan scholar: Il teologo e l'economia.

The economic crisis: merely moral?

Paul St Amour was asking, in his paper, whether the current economic crisis is merely moral. Is it merely greed and irresponsibility that is at the root of this crisis, as President Obama seems to imply? And if so, is it merely a question of determination, of the will to overcome? St Amour thinks not. He, together with a range of economists (I think he mentioned Martin Wolff, Gillian Ted, Kevin Philips, James Fowles, Henry Haslett, Simon Johnson, Stephen Roach, Richard Duncan), believes that the prime cause is not greed but ignorance, or the lack of proper understanding of what has been going on. Many of these economists, together with Lonergan, are what St Amour calls 'realists': i.e., they believe that the real economy is the production economy, and that financial services and derivatives are precisely that: derivative.

I am no expert at all, but this does seem to vibe with what a Nashik friend says: that no one seems to really know what is going on, and that everyone becomes an expert after the fact.