At the level of ideas, this is a book that has been intelligently conceived and planned. It provides good examples of the various types of conflict that afflict the African continent and helps the reader to understand the underlying causes of conflict, going back to the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, convened by Bismarck, to which not a single African representative was invited, when the European powers, eager to avoid conflict among themselves, carved up Africa without regard for existing systems of government or for tribal, ethnic, linguistic or religious groupings; the result was the destruction of existing forms of government, the division of existing groupings on fairly arbitrary political lines and the throwing together of different tribes and language groups within artificially created states. Since then tensions between peoples of different backgrounds have inevitably developed and these have, in turn, been manipulated and exploited for various political and economic reasons by unscrupulous politicians, African as well as European. The result is the Africa we know and read of almost daily in our newspapers. The Berlin Conference is the remote, the systematic discrimination on behalf of some and against other groupings the proximate, cause of the strife and violence that so disfigure and impoverish a continent rich in natural and human resources.
The Catholic Church has responded to the conflict in Africa by offering analyses of the problems the continent faces and suggesting ways in which these problems might be overcome. Dr Orji, an African himself, cites a series of statements issuing from a broad range of Church synods and conferences: the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace of 1988, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops of 2001, the African Synod of Bishops of 1994, and Pope John Paul II's Post-Synodal Exhortation, the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace also of 1994, and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria over several years. Needless to say, there is a great deal of repetition in these statements both in respect of the analyses they offer and the solutions they propose – one of the difficulties of Orji's presentation is a tendency to heap quotations and ideas together to the general bewilderment of the reader. However, with a bit of effort it is possible to pick out at least two areas where Orji finds that the statements issued by these various bodies fall short. He thinks they pay too much attention to specifically Muslim-Christian conflict without giving sufficient attention to the positive contribution to be made by African Traditional Religion (ATR) and the experience of other minority religious groups; and he thinks that all of the Church statements fail to address “the issue of why the human person is prone to acts of prejudice … Why is bias or prejudice a phenomenon that consumes the human person individually and as a group?” This radical question, overlooked in so many pronouncements, is the kind of question that “Lonergan takes up in a dramatic fashion” (pp. 44–5).
These reflections in the book's opening chapter lead on to an examination in the second chapter of some of Lonergan's key ideas on progress and decline alongside his analysis of the fourfold nature of bias – dramatic, individual, group and general bias – and, in chapters 3 and 4, reflections on how, according to Lonergan, bias can be overcome by self-transcendence, conversion (all three kinds), dialogue and dialectic. Should the reader find all of this rather theoretical, the author provides concrete evidence of the value of Lonergan's contribution to the issue of conflict in Africa by citing, in the fifth and final chapter, both key texts from the African Bishops’ Synod of 1994 and samples of how these texts might be re-written and extended in the light of Lonergan's ideas. With potted summaries of each of the preceding chapters and re-writes of the 1994 Synodal proposals on Lonerganian lines, this last chapter is a brave attempt at bringing down to earth and rendering practical the somewhat academic discussions of Lonergan's ideas that have dominated the three preceding chapters. It also, I suspect, reflects a well-founded anxiety – on the part of the author or possibly of his doctoral supervisor – that some sorting and clarification of the plethora of ideas covered in chapters 2, 3 and 4 are very much in order.
Orji holds a doctorate in theology from Marquette University and my reckoning is that this book is the product of the doctoral thesis. While he is to be commended for his industry, especially in his grasp of many aspects of Lonergan's thought, his work suffers a good deal when considered as a book. He would have been wise to wield the editorial pen more freely in order to reduce the book's intellectual density. Lonergan is a highly systematic thinker and one part of his thinking tends to link with and support another; this makes it difficult to deal with selected aspects of his thought and creates the temptation, which ought to be resisted, to present the reader with the whole works – but in a highly compressed form, without the spaciousness and exemplification to be found in Lonergan's own writings (which the late Eric Mascall perceptively described as “at once voluminous and condensed.”) The result is writing that must appear fairly impenetrable to those not already familiar with Lonergan's ideas. I have to say that Orji's text suffers from such impenetrability in places. It is my experience that Lonergan's writings more often require further expansion and not further reduction. When adapting his thesis to book form Orji would have been well advised to select his material more narrowly, to reduce the references to the secondary literature on Lonergan and, most especially, to refrain from giving us the benefit of the various stages of development Lonergan's ideas went through and of the influences that shaped these developments. Not enough attention is paid to the needs of the reader: the book is too condensed and over-stuffed, especially in the sections dealing with Lonergan, the Index does not do full justice to the book's content (“Bismarck” and the “Berlin Conference” do not appear), and the list of Lonergan's writings fails to indicate the date of their first publication. It is also spoiled by a great many typographical errors, ranging from the omission of words – in one case the word “not”– to the running of words together, from bizarre punctuation to the confusion of singulars and plurals. All of this gets in the way of the reader's concentration and makes the book hard to digest and almost impossible to enjoy.
