In recent years there have been several important treatments of the knowing that unfolds under the auspices of colleges and universities rooted within a theological horizon. These works owe significant debt to the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ: examples include John Haughey's Where Is Knowing Going, Kenneth Garcia's Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University, and Cyril Orji's The Catholic University and the Search for Truth. To that number I add Authentic Cosmopolitanism by R. J. Snell (Eastern University) and Steven D. Cone (Lincoln Christian University), which pays particular attention to Lonergan's notion of cosmopolis (first articulated in an essay, “The Role of the Catholic University in the Modern World”). Their thesis is that Christian universities exist to develop cosmopolitans, in Lonergan's sense—that is, self-conscious knowers and (more importantly) lovers who have come to a developed understanding of their own understanding, and who therefore can participate in the project of cultural growth through a discerning attitude toward what is worth knowing and loving.

Snell and Cone develop their thesis by drawing from the work of Martin Heidegger and Charles Taylor, and by way of seminal figures such as Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas. Their aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the loving person who seeks to know. The book begins with such an account in part 1, where “properly ordered love precedes intellect and results in ordered action, knowledge, and life” (x). A knower must undertake noetic exegesis in order to discern directions of authenticity, in contrast to directions of decline and the flight from knowing. He or she must pay particular attention to patterns of imitation of cultural norms, which, following Heidegger, might require resistance. Following Taylor, they suggest that authenticity is more than “being true to oneself,” but rather requires the discovery of love with and for others.

Part 2 addresses the way Christian universities strive to broker moral and religious conversion within a person of emerging authenticity. I found it interesting that this section is rooted in a Reformed view of nature and grace and the doctrine of total depravity, with its resulting disorder in intellect, yet relies primarily on the theology of Aquinas and Lonergan's translation of Aquinas into phenomenological terms. Lonergan's translation, the authors argue, overcomes the difficulties that Reformed theology finds in Thomas. Lonergan attends to a unified self in whom sin has distorted both love and knowledge, and in whom the search for authenticity is at once a dependence on grace and an attentiveness to “consciousness becom[ing] conscience” in a thirst for moral order. A person of rightly ordered love, made possible through grace, seeks knowledge that overcomes the various forms of bias and alienation.

Part 3, entitled “Educating for Value: Authentic Humans and the Order of Love,” is the culmination of their argument about the role of the university. The authors examine virtue ethics and value ethics as strong accounts of moral transformation, interestingly citing John Paul II's “Theology of the Body” as an instance of living according to an authentic, intentional vocational life. Ultimately, then, the university exists to promote this kind of transformation. Using Lonergan's notion of cosmopolis, they suggest that the university is a place of cosmopolitan transformation—that is, a place that reverses cultural decline and gives birth to authentic cultural growth. Such an education is rooted in noetic exegesis, self-appropriation, moral and religious conversion, and integration. Their conclusion points to an ambitious goal: “The purpose of a Christian university is to enable . . . the collaboration of humans with each other and cooperation with God towards the goal of self-transcending love—authentic cosmopolitanism (181).”

I recommend this text for graduate students interested in the theology of the modern university, and in particular as an introduction to the seminal work of Lonergan. It may be beyond the reach of most undergraduates, even though it might help explain some of the theory behind the experiences that religiously affiliated colleges and universities invite them to undertake.