Bernard Lonergan on a Catholic Liberal Arts Education

With a call for integration commonly expected in liberal arts education, this article explores the philosophy of Bernard Lonergan. Highly specialized disciplines, as valuable as they are to preserving and expanding a profes-sional knowledge base, can nonetheless lead to the extreme compartmental-ization of education. This article offers a philosophical foundation on which to build a truly Catholic liberal arts education. At a time when John Paul IPs Ex Corde Ecclesiae urges Catholic highereducation to foster the dialogue between faith and culture, the issue remains "how to do it? " How are educators in Catholic universities to foster the encounter of faith with contemporary specialized knowledge? In fact, how are they to foster interdisciplinary dialogue in general? How can techni-cal and scientific questions be placed within the framework of human ques-tions, that is, questions about the ultimate character of the human person and human community? And how can such humanistic questions be set within a framework capable of critiquing positions and policies that are quite patent-ly "inhuman"? Finally, how do all such human questions fit within a religiou