Inside the Core We Celebrate Francesca Zaccaron's Publication

Inside the Core, we love to celebrate faculty accomplishments, and this week we are focusing on a recent article by Toth-Lonergan Scholar and Core and CAST faculty member Francesca Zaccaron. Growing out of a talk Zaccaron gave last year, the article concerns an imaginary exchange between philosophers and theologians Nikolai Berdyaev and Bernard Lonergan. Titled “The Priority of Interior Life: Berdyaev and Lonergan in Dialogue on Democracy,” the article appears in Religions 16, no. 3 (2025): 308.

Francesca Zaccaron, Ph.D., is the current Toth-Lonergan visiting scholar at Seton Hall University and is director of Anthropologica – Journal of Philosophical Studies (Jacques Maritain Institute, Trieste, Italy).

She explains how she came to write this important piece:

I imagined a dialogue between Nikolai Berdyaev and Bernard Lonergan about the role and primacy of spiritual life in building democracy. Berdyaev and Lonergan (in the original paper, Maritain was also involved, but the article focuses more on the other two) lived through different situations under totalitarian regimes, and both are men of faith. Berdyaev is a convert, so he looks even more passionate about the importance of faith and spiritual life. Both Berdyaev and Lonergan consider the spiritual life the source of an authentic life of the subject, the source of all actions. This, and being open to conversion, leads the subject to collaborate with others and, according to Lonergan, to build cosmopolis. In the difficult times the world is facing, I thought that their reflection might help us in reflecting on our own responsibility as Christians, as Catholics, to promote the common good, the greater good and to protect democracy.

Indeed, this topic could not be more timely and is applicable to those from other faiths as well as Christianity, as interiority is relevant to other, non-Christian religions, though decidedly central to Catholicism.

Zaccaron is in her second year as the Toth-Lonergan Scholar and in teaching for the Core. In her first role, she leads discussions based on the thought of Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, whose writings range from theological insight to philosophy to economics and politics. She is able to engage with faculty from a wide variety of disciplines on the subject of Lonergan’s thought.  

Similarly, as a Core faculty member, she engages with students in interdisciplinary Core classes, where the Catholic intellectual tradition, in conversation with other perspectives, informs discussions of meaning and values and how they apply to our personal and societal lives.

The links between Core classes and the paper are clear, especially seen in the abstract Zaccaron wrote about her scholarship on this topic:

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the priority of interior life for democracy, imagining a dialogue between Nicolai Berdyaev and Bernard Lonergan. My claim is that Berdyaev and Lonergan converge on the same perspective while affirming that only a subject who considers the spiritual life the source of her own life and actions and is open to conversion is able to collaborate with others in building what Lonergan calls a cosmopolis, which represents a core aspect of democracy.

In an age facing a dearth of reflection in our political and cultural milieu, the work Zaccaron is doing is all the more important.

Here is a link to the article.

We are very grateful to have Zaccaron teaching our Core students as well as offering intellectually and spiritually insightful lectures to faculty.

Categories: Faith and Service