2025 Australian Lonergan Workshop
Authentic Friendships Supporting Vulnerable Democracies
The 2025 Australian Lonergan Workshop was held on Friday 16th May and Saturday 17th May 2025.
Keynote presentation
Tom Daly Oration
Dr Jennifer Sanders, Mooney Professor in Catholic Studies, St.Louis University, Missouri presented on:
Meeting Historical Decline with Christian Hope: Ignatius, Lonergan, and
Spiritual Conversations
What does Christian hope have to do with our secular age and how can it meet the problem of the longer cycle of decline? Christian hope is essential to navigating this moment in human history because it counters the despair, determinism, and desolation that permeate our felt-sense of historical decline and derail recovery. Bernard Lonergan’s theological response to historical decline foregrounds the centrality of the theological virtues. This paper advances Lonergan’s understanding the third differential of history (recovery) by elaborating upon hope, while also proposing spiritual practices to cultivate an increase in hope.
Jennifer Sanders is the Mooney Professor in Catholic Studies and the Academic Program Coordinator of the Catholic Studies Program at Saint Louis University. She studied philosophy before going on to complete her doctorate in systematic theology at Boston College, where she wrote her dissertation on Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology and anthropology in light of Bernard Lonergan’s Verbum articles. Her current scholarship focuses on bringing Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology and soteriology into conversation with theologies of nonviolence and Ignatian spirituality. Dr. Sanders’ writing on these topics can be found in Theological Studies and The Lonergan Review. Dr. Sanders teaches courses for the Catholic Studies minor and major, drawing upon her background in philosophy and theology along with her love of literature, film, and Dr. Martin Luther King. Her role also includes contributing to forming students in the riches of the Ignatian tradition and facilitating the integration of intellectual formation with social, moral, and spiritual formation.
Archbishop Clement Papa, Archbishop of Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea presented the 2025 Thomas Daly Oration on:
The PNG Experiment, and the Contribution of
Bernard Lonergan and Tom Daly
Since independence, Papua New Guinea has enjoyed some extraordinarily exciting times in the making of a single and unique nation out of a thousand tribes. But this drive towards social integration in the post-independence era has brought enormous social challenges.
As we move towards good governance, self-autonomy, improving standards of living, preservation of traditional culture and identity, constitutional changes, political reforms, responding to climate change, and the provision of basic social services to remote outposts, we need a national conversation which will accommodate the total picture of a new generation of people, a transforming society and its contemporary challenges, the recent political history and its impact on social change.
This Oration engages Lonergan’s theology of redemptive history, incorporating progress, decline and redemption, to expand our insights and identify multiple clues to possible practical solutions to the complex situation in PNG.
Archbishop Clement Papa is the newly appointed Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Mount Hagen, Papual New Guinea, a Diocese located in the PNG Highlands. Clement was a student of Tom Daly, SJ. He holds a BA (Hons) in Theology from the Catholic Theological Institute, Port Moresby, and a Licentiate in Dogmatic Theology from the Pontifical Urbaniana University, Rome, and a Doctorate in Systematic Theology from the University of Divinity, Melbourne. Most of his priestly ministry has been spent in formation work at the Good Shepherd Seminary, Banz, in the PNG highlands. His doctoral thesis was a study dealing with Bernard Lonergan’s idea of redemptive history and its application to PNG social concerns.
More about the Tom Daly Oration can be found here.