3rd October 2025
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Professor Matthew Ogilvie, University of Notre Dame Australia will present on “Lonergan, Finality, Love and Politics”
This presentation takes inspiration from Bernard Lonergan’s “Finality, Love, Marriage”. It will propose that Lonergan’s explanations of finality and love, applied to friendship and politics, can diagnose the cause of various political problems today and show a better way at the party, national, and international levels. It will draw on the presenter’s experience in politics and his work in the field of terrorism. It will start with Lonergan, and will engage Aristotle’s account of friendship, and also draw upon Australian Aboriginal law concerning close relationships. It will highlight the destructive influence of purely horizontal finality in politics and political relationships, and how this can be overcome with a focus on [a] vertical finality.
A presentation of 40 minutes will be followed by 30 minutes of questions/discussion.
Matthew Ogilvie is Professor of theology at University of Notre Dame Australia. He holds a MTh from the Sydney College of Divinity (supervised by Peter Beer SJ) and a PhD in theology from the University of Sydney (co-supervised by Tom Daly SJ). He has a number of publications reflecting his wide theological interests, which include systematic theology, religion and science, religion and terrorism. His first book, Faith Seeking Understanding: The Functional Specialty ‘Systematics’ in Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology was published in 2001 by Marquette University Press. In his “spare time,” Professor Ogilvie is a self-defense instructor and a venomous snake catcher for WA Parks and Wildlife. His latest publication is “What Makes for “a Civilised Life”?: Leisure, Liberal Values, and Australian Aboriginal Approaches to Work and Technology”, in M Fielding and J Esler (eds), Religion and Identity in the Indian Ocean World (Bloomsbury 2025).
7:00 pm – 8:15 pm, 11 November 2025 AEDT
Register here