iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is such good advice. You have to keep faith that, if you show up and honor the process, the tap remains open.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Lonergan, *Method in Theology*, 330

Now, however, our interest is not in dialectic as affecting theological opinions but in dialectic as affecting community, action, situation. It affects community for, just as common meaning is constitutive of community, so dialectic divides community into radically opposed groups. It affects action for, just as conversion leads to intelligent, reasonable, responsible action, so dialectic adds division, conflict, oppression. It affects the situation, for situations are the cumulative product of previous actions, and when previous actions have been guided by the light and darkness of dialectic, the resulting situation is not some intelligible whole but rather a set of misshapen, poorly proportioned, and incoherent fragments.8 Finally, the divided community, their conflicting actions, and the messy situation are headed for disaster. For the messy situation is diagnosed differently by the divided community; action is ever more at cross-purposes; and the situation becomes still messier to provoke still sharper differences in diagnosis and policy, more radical criticism of one another’s actions, and an ever deeper crisis in the situation.

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Mulcahy @midwest-mulcahy.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

In my view, Joseph Gordon’s ‘Divine Scripture in Human Understanding’ is the best I’ve read, Protestant or otherwise

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Jacob W. Torbeck @jacobtorbeck.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Since the Bible isn’t my primary subject area (even if I teach it every term), my answer is going to reflect a certain limitation in reading, but I’m partial to Harvest of Hope (McIntosh/Griswold, a bit “academic light”) and Divine scripture in human understanding (Gordon - scholarly)

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

A sort of *dialectical traditionalism* if you will.

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I enjoyed getting to talk with @josinaguess.bsky.social about my love for and work with snakes earlier this summer. Her lovely piece "In Defense of Snakes" has just come out in this month's @sojo.net magazine:

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

On October 24 at @setonhall.bsky.social, the Center for Catholic Studies (of which my Lonergan Institute is a part) is hosting an event called "Magnifica Humanitas & Our Shared Future" as part of its "Ethics and Values in the Era of AI" series. QR code in image takes you to registration page.

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

"Were they deprived of intelligence and became mere observers of fact like jellyfish, then they would be truly positivists, but their positivism would not be of any service to them." Bernard Lonergan.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

“Theology is not the full science of man… theology illuminates only certain aspects of human reality…[&] the church can become a fully conscious process of self-constitution only when theology unites itself with all other relevant branches of human studies.” Lonergan taking prescient shots at RO

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John Krambuhl @johnkrambuhl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Let’s go!!

A book of essays in honor of Robert Doran, S.J.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

If there’s one thing Lonergan loved, it’s a little chart

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

"The most pressing challenge of our contemporary situation is to measure up to the significance of the fact that all human understanding is tied to specific times and places and to think through how this judgment should affect Christian engagement with Scripture." @josephkgordon.bsky.social

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I'm excited to talk with the local chapter of @wildonesnatives.bsky.social, @wildones-smokymts.bsky.social tomorrow night (8/26) about our native herpetofauna and strategies for welcoming them to our yards! #Knoxville locals should check it out: smokymountains.wildones.org/events/?wo_e...

smokymountains.wildones.org

Events

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

I want to take this doctoral seminar with my very good friend who is an awesome theologian and who is using my (!?!?!) book amongst these awesome books! I'm really looking forward to having a conversation with Anne and her students about all this.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

I hope each of you knows that you’ve made today a special day, just by being *you*. There’s no one else in the whole world just like you & there never will be. People can like you (& God loves you) just exactly the way you are.

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RT @ryankturnbull.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

This years theme for the Season of Creation is “Living Water” based on Ezekiel 47. Check out this ecumenical resource booklet for more theological background and some ideas for services and activities. resources.arocha.org/wp-content/u...

resources.arocha.org

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

My latest in @commonwealmagazine.org: www.commonwealmagazine.org/conquering-d...

Beneath the blankets in our Milwaukee bedroom, my wife was consumed again with tearful anxiety over the fragility of our firstborn. A couple of years before, in Boston, a teacher recognized me as the type who “prays with his metaphysics.” So, I began to rehearse to Annie the logical implications of calling God our creator. What God makes, God loves, and what God loves, God knows. Further, God makes, loves, and knows eternally, without beginning or end. This making-loving-knowing does not pass into an infinite past nor emerge into an infinite future. All of God’s making-loving-knowing is a single, perfect, living, and luminous act. Nothing loved or known in and by this act is or can ever be lost.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

I have a short essay in this issue about death and the surprisingly comforting metaphysics of what it means when we call the eternal God "Creator." CW: stillbirth www.commonwealmagazine.org/conquering-d...

commonwealmagazine.org

Conquering Death

"When we wonder why death takes a life too soon, we bring forth a more wondrous puzzle: Why are there lives to be taken at all?"

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

This article rules. I come back to it a lot.

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

"Understanding human nature is one thing and understanding human historicity is another. To understand the constant, nature, one may study any individual. But to understand the variable, historicity, one has to study each instance in its singularity." Bernard Lonergan

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Balthasar 🤝 Lonergan, there is no Aristotelian science of the particular (which is a problem for it, uh oh)

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Niamh @niamhatheologian.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

It is probably a good thing I am only teaching one course next term (subject to enrollment numbers) because if I were teaching more courses I would somehow find a way to bring in Joseph Gordon's Divine Scripture in Human Understanding.

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Rattlesnake Solutions @rattlesnakes.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

For the herpers: Please read this article and consider. rattlesnakesolutions.com/snakeblog/sc...

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

In my phd course, Theological Methods, I’m pitting John Behr’s “In Accordance With the Scriptures” “against” Joseph Gordon’s “Divine Scripture In Human Understanding.” (not really against) So we can really have some cognitive dissonance without doing simply historical criticism all by itself.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

I am psyched for these students

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

I know my Bluesky isn't totally broken, because @teamsocrates.bsky.social @nietzschean.bsky.social and @marcusaurelius2026.bsky.social have all followed me in the past few days. But no love for Bernie? Let me know if you can still see my (admittedly lamely infrequent) posts.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Lonergan on the “Question of God” in his *Method in Theology*

Excerpt from Method in Theology, pg 97-98:
The possibility of inquiry on the side of the subject lies in his intelligence, in his drive to know what, why, now, and in his ability to reach intellectually satistying answers. But why should the answers that satisty the intelligence of the subject yield anything more than a subjective satisfaction? Why should they be supposed to possess any relevance to knowledge of the universe? Of course, we assume that they do. We can point to the fact that our assumption is confirmed by its fruits. So implicitly we grant that the universe is intelligible, and once that is granted, there arises the question whether the universe could be intelligible without having an intelligent ground. But that is the question about God.
Again, to reflect on reflection is to ask just what happens when we marshal and weigh the evidence for pronouncing that this probably is so and that probably is not so. To what do these metaphors of marshaling and weighing refer? Elsewhere I have worked out an answer to this question, and here I can do no more than summarily repeat my conclusion. Judgment proceeds rationally from a grasp of a virtually unconditioned. By an unconditioned is meant any x that has no conditions. By a virtually unconditioned is meant any x that has no unfulfilled conditions. In other words, a virtually unconditioned is a conditioned whose conditions are all fulfilled.
To marshal the evidence is to ascertain whether all the conditions are ful-filled. To weigh the evidence is to ascertain whether the fulfilment of the conditions certamiy or probably ivolves the existence or occurrence of the
conditioned.
Now this account of judgment implicitly contains a further element. It we are to speak of a virtually unconditioned, we must first speak of an uncon-ditioned. The virtually unconditioned has no unfulfilled conditions. The strictly unconditioned has no conditions whatever. In traditional terms, the former is a contingent being, and the latt…

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I’m not sure this is *directly* related to admission of error BUT yes: Lonergan thinks the realization that statistical knowledge is *real* knowledge, not just a cloak for ignorance, is of enormous importance for modern epistemology & is a big lesson Cath thought needed to learn from nat science

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Tell all your friends! Bernard Lonergan: A Primer for Understanding his Life, Work, and Influence (tentative title), is officially at press w/Cascade@wipfandstock.bsky.social Please share with anyone you know interested in theology or philosophy! Here's the Table of Contents:

Table of Contents and list of figures for Bernard Lonergan: A Primer for Understanding his life, work, and influence, by Joseph K. Gordon. Forthcoming with Cascade.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter One: Who is Bernard Lonergan, SJ?
Chapter Two: Lonergan “Reaching up to the Mind of St. Thomas.”
Chapter Three: Lonergan Turning Everything Upside Down: Insight
Chapter Four: Lonergan as Teaching and Learning Theologian
Chapter Five: Lonergan on Doing Theology After History: Method in Theology
Chapter Six: Lonergan on Understanding, and Making, History (with God)
Chapter Seven: Lonergan’s Unfolding Influence: In Place of a Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Figures and Illustrations
Figure 1: Discerning Cognitional Structure (Pt. 1)
Figure 2: Discerning Cognitional Structure (Pt. 2)
Figure 3: Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, Tom. II, Tract. I, Lib. X.
Figure 4: The Functional Specialties
Figure 5: The Dynamism of the Functional Specialties
Figure 6: “The Great Chain of Being” from Didacus Valades, Rhetorica Christiana (1579)
Figure 7: Schematic of the Disciplines of Human Understanding
Figure 8: Portrayal of Lonergan’s Scale of Values/Preferences

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

From the last page of an earlier draft of Lonergan’s *Insight*: “Anyone that has found himself in error on one point can initiate a scrutiny that cumulatively will bring to light any other errors in which he happens to be involved. Nor will he labor alone in the purification of his own mind…”

For further insights depend upon one’s past accumulation of insights, and further judgments depend upon the context of habitual judgments that favor sone new affirmations and are hostile to others. None the less, there is available the critique of erroneous beliefs that has been outlined. Anyone that has found iinself in error on one point can initiate a scrutiny that cumulatively will bring to light any other errors in which he happens to be involved. Nor will he labor alone in the purification of his own mind, for the realization of the solution and its development in each of us is principally the work of God who illuminates our intellects to understand what he had not understood and to grasp as unconditioned what we had reputed as error, who breaks the bonds of our habitual unwillingness to be utterly genuine in intelligent inquiry and critical reflection by inspiring the hope that reinforces the detached, disinterested, unrestricted desire to know and by infusing the charity, the dispassionate, unrelenting at-oneness with all the true, the real, the good, that outlasts the fire-ball of the atom bomb and immeasurably exceeds its power to change the living of man.

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Democrat Cats @democratcats.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Magnificent 👀

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

When, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I could feel how... bereft my students had become, I wrote this essay to try to both affirm their value & offer some guidance. I still use it at the start of my classes. It's on my website in case others might find it helpful. www.jonathanheaps.com/being-you

jonathanheaps.com

Being You — Jonathan Heaps, PhD

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RT @ryankturnbull.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

This is really a fantastic book and so much better than DBH’s book on tradition that came out around the same time.

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Extremely funny that we as a nation are in a fight with nature (metaphorically, as in "science is for the weak") and now the fight has become as literal as possible. Algae, meanwhile, is like: I looooooove water. Yay water. There is so much water here. I grow so fast. I'm so green.

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

At long last, I have completed the draft of my next book, Bernard Lonergan: A Primer for Understanding his Life, Work, and Influence (it'll be on its way to the press, @wipfandstock.bsky.social, July 1)!

static.klipy.com

Jeb Bush's 'Please Clap' Moment

ALT: Jeb Bush's 'Please Clap' Moment

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

On my way to and from #GARD2026 I have helped four box turtles (Terrepene carolinensis) across roads. If you can do safely, point them in the direction they are heading and thoroughly disinfect your hands; I need nitrile gloves in the car! This has been an inspiring and sobering conference.

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BC Theology @bctheology.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Kudos to professor emerita Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, who was awarded the 2026 Arrupe Award at the University of Scranton. At the ceremony she presented a lecture titled: "Healing and Creating in History: The Redemptive Praxis of Christian Community”.

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Kara N. Slade @karanslade.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

I can't believe it's already the 5th anniversary of the Ding Dang Gospel tweet. (Highlights by the Rev. Ben DeHart.)

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

I'm finally almost finished with the last chapter of Bernard Lonergan: A Primer for Understanding his Life, Work, and Influence (contracted with Cascade/Wipf and Stock). This project has taken far too long (I've been working on and off since 2018), but I'm pleased with it, overall.

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Mark DelCogliano @markdelcogliano.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Job Alert: tenure-track position in Theological Ethics at the rank of assistant professor to begin in the fall semester of 2027, in the Dept. of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. Please share widely!

nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com

University Of St. Thomas (MN)

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Get your Vatican-produced encyclical infographics! Link to google drive folder: drive.google.com/drive/folder...

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

You made today a special day just by being you. There’s no one else in the whole world just like you and people can like you just the way you are.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Lonergan on the coincident advents of modern science, the Enlightenment, and dogmatic theology: "When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties." "Theology in Its New Context," (1968)

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

I do this exercise w/ theology students: imagine in an important area of your life, you can only operate on what you understood at 14. Every other area, you grow in understanding, but in e.g. romance or finances? 14. How’s that part of life going to go? Now when do people stop learning re: religion?

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

The other sort of canned thing I have is my response when students inevitably ask me if I think religion is ultimately good or bad. “Religion is powerful,” I’d tell them, “and so dangerous. In that regard, it’s like the table saw in my dad’s garage.”

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Commonweal @commonwealmagazine.org · 22/04/2026

For Bernard Lonergan, the drama of human history is—even right now, even in the United States—in the process of being redeemed by God through grace. An essay by @JonathanRHeaps:

commonwealmagazine.org

Things Will Get Better Before They Get Worse

For Bernard Lonergan, the drama of human history is—even right now, even in the United States—in the process of being redeemed by God through grace.

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

I discuss this, and Lonergan's identification/specification of major and minor authenticity, in the conclusion of the penultimate chapter of my Lonergan intro.

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