How to Love Everyone, Even Your Enemies
Monday, February 6, 2023
Presenter, Sanders, Ph.D.
On Thursday, February 23rd, 2023, the Center for Catholic Studies will hold its annual Spring Lonergan Lecture. This year’s lecture "Martin Luther King, Jr. & Bernard Lonergan: How to Love Everyone, Even Your Enemies" will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Chancellor’s Suite featuring Jennifer Sanders, Ph.D., of St. Louis University.
Bernard J. Lonergan
The Spring Lonergan Lecture is going to be a conversation between Martin Luther King, Jr. and theologian Bernard Lonergan on nonviolence and the cross. The primary focus will be Lonergan's essay, "The Mediation of Christ in Prayer," looking at what kind of mutual self-mediation Christ invites us to, and how nonviolent direct action is a participation in this kind of mutual self-mediation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Sanders's argument is that Christ came to establish a genuinely universal and unrestricted mutual self-mediation, wherein we are truly unrestricted with respect to who we mediate ourselves in relation to. Christ asks us to mediate ourselves even in relation to our enemies, just as He did. Dr. King helps us understand how this is possible, and how such an unrestricted mutual self-mediation can be responsibly lived, that is, how it can be lived without further harming the oppressed.
Sanders is the Mooney Professor of Catholic Studies at Saint Louis University. She teaches courses on themes such as the good life and the Catholic imagination. She is also involved in the Catholic Studies Center’s Campion Society, where she contributes to forming students in the riches of the Ignatian tradition. Sanders completed her doctorate in systematic theology at Boston College, and her scholarship focuses on bringing Bernard Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology and soteriology into conversation with theologies of nonviolence.
A response will be offered by Sr. Mary Bosco Ebere Amakwe, Adjunct Professor from Seton Hall’s college of Communication and the Arts, and noted scholar and author, Jonathan Heaps, Ph.D..
All Seton Hall University students, faculty and staff are welcome to attend.
For more information and to register for the event, please visit the University Calendar listing.
Categories: Arts and Culture, Faith and Service, Nation and World, Research
