Presentation: ‘The Culture has become a slum’: The Need for a Primary Dialectic of Culture

Presenter: Father Robin Koning SJ,Director, Australian Lonergan Centre

In proposing a dialectics of history which can provide the general categories for theology, Robert Doran develops Lonergan’s scale of values in a number of ways. He notes a series of dialectics within different levels of the scale, notably the social and personal levels. With cultural values, though, while Doran draws on Lonergan’s account by distinguishing an everyday level of culture from a reflective level, he does not present these in terms of a dialectic. Where he does speak of a dialectic of culture, he sees this operating within the everyday level of culture in what he terms a secondary dialectic between anthropological and cosmological constitutive meanings. In this paper, I will explore the possibility of and need for developing a primary dialectic of culture, grounded in a series of hints in this direction in Lonergan’s own work.

Father Robin Koning SJ currently serves as Provincial Assistant for Vocations, which entails engagement in various young adult ministries, including living at Bellarmine House in Sydney, a small hostel for university students that the Jesuits run. Previously he taught systematic theology through the University of Divinity and served as Socius to the Provincial of the Jesuits in Australia. In the 1990s he worked in an Aboriginal parish in the Kimberley and has published a number of articles on inculturation, based on his experience there, and more generally on culture as a category in theology. He offers spiritual direction and gives workshops on Ignatian prayer and the Rules for Discernment of Spirits.

He holds a Doctor of Theology, a Licentiate in Sacred Theology, a Graduate Diploma of Arts (Aboriginal Studies), a Bachelor of Theology and a Bachelor of Science.

Schedule: 40 minute presentation followed by 30 minutes of questions and discussion

Register at: https://lonergan.org.au/registration-2026-may/