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37 chapter฀3 Professional Education as Transformation Robert J. Deahl Ihave been for the last thirteen years the dean of the College of Professional Studies at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The college is one of eleven colleges and schools at Marquette and is committed to educating working professionals—adult, nontraditional students—throughout southeastern Wisconsin. While writing this chapter, I have been working with my staff, faculty, and advisors in completing a strategic plan for the college as we prepare to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary in 2011. This plan is part of a universitywide effort designed to meet one of the critical needs that we face in Catholic higher education in the years ahead, namely, the need to achieve a wholeness and a unity that are easily overlooked despite our best efforts to work in concert with one another across disciplines, among diverse faculty, and throughout the university. One of the cornerstones of our planning is to create, fund, implement, and launch a Center for Community Transformation. This center will be at the heart of the college’s undergraduate, master’s, and community learning programs and will provide a central, unifying place to bring together diverse individuals and groups to help restore and heal the problems we face throughout our local and regional communities. As I think about these plans and the work that I have been involved in as dean, it strikes me that the nearly lifelong influence of Bernard Lonergan has played a pivotal role in how I approach my personal and professional life and work both within and outside the academy. This chapter explains how Lonergan has helped me with my own vision and commitment to bring a better sense of wholeness and unity to my college, to the university, and to the Milwaukee community. This book has used the term “catholicity,” a notion that John Haughey embraced and elucidated in Where Is Knowing Going? The Horizons of the Knowing Subject to capture this sense of wholeness. Haughey notes, We are all hopers about any number of things. There is the ever present need and hope to keep moving from obscurity to clarity or to see the fuller picture, or to answer elusive questions. By getting past our ever importuning immediacies, we should be able to appreciate the fact that we are scripted to pursue some kind of pleroma: a completion, a fullness, just as surely as we are scripted to know what is so and what is good. The notion of catholicity keeps 38 Robert J. Deahl beckoning us on to a more, to something yawning out before us, leading us on, that is in the genre of is and is good, but also of a more that is not more of the same.1 Striving toward Wholeness: Catholicity in Personal Reflection and Shared Conversations I had the joy and honor of meeting and speaking with Bernard Lonergan at the Lonergan Workshop held at Boston College in 1981. I was in the middle of writing my dissertation, Doing Ethics in the Third Stage of Meaning: Retrieving Ethics through the Generalized Empirical Method of Bernard J. F. Lonergan as a Disclosive and Transformative Function of Interiority, under the direction of mentor and friend Josef Fuchs, and was home for the summer between my fifth and sixth year of studies in Rome. The dissertation focused on adapting the early work of Robert Doran to Lonergan’s method and applying both to the field of ethics. Lonergan’s positive comments about the focus of my work provided a great source of encouragement and support.2 As I think about my personal life journey and the professional work that I have been involved in as a faculty member and dean, it becomes clear that Lonergan has influenced me in two primary ways. First, his focus on intentionality analysis by way of integrating the discipline of the transcendental precepts has convinced me of the need for the personal practice of self-appropriation . This is not a one-time event but a regular, sustained reflective practice in which I consciously and intentionally take stock of what I am doing and why I am doing it. In this regard I resonate strongly with David Orr’s notion of slow knowledge as he explains it in The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture and Human Invention . Orr argues for the need to engage in slow, reflective knowledge: “Because new knowledge often requires rearranging worldviews and paradigms which we can only do slowly. Instead of increasing...

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