iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Not sure exactly, but the signs were early: I snuck into the garden to eat unripe tomatoes and green beans as a four-year-old; I fell in love with snakes and spiders around the same time.

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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Just finished edits on an article on snakes and creation care forthcoming in Ex Auditu (@wipfandstock.bsky.social). Nice view from the temporary office today: #amwriting #scholarship #theology #bible #scripture

A computer monitor and laptop with a pdf proof of an article "Taking up (the cause of) Serpents" with a nice campus view of Johnson University in the background.

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Jonathan Heaps @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

In case you missed the livestream of the 2026 Lonergan Symposium, "Mysticism and Method" with Mary Frohlich, Amy Maxey, and Kevin Hughes, you can still watch it here on YouTube: www.youtube.com/live/3PgnZpe...

youtube.com

2026 Fall Lonergan Symposium

YouTube video by Seton Hall University

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Anne M. Carpenter @catholickungfu.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Everybody who knows something had a moment where they didn't know it yet. The really interesting thing, the miracle part, is where they started to want to know, and didn't stop working at it until they did. Doesn't matter how silly or obvious it supposedly was. Welcome to learning.

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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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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Just finished a review of this for Theological Studies. It is, indeed, magisterial.

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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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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Jon, do you want to explore this biblically and/or unbiblically? Or give a talk on how different meanings/understandings of Scripture are responses to different questions brought to it? Also, Anne, do you want to write/present a response to your methods seminar question pitting me against Behr?

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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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Joseph (Joe) K. Gordon @josephkgordon.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

I'm very excited about this! I meant to mention it in my email, you might have your students read Behr's response to my book and my follow-up to him here: syndicate.network/symposia/the...

syndicate.network

Divine Scripture in Human Understanding | Syndicate

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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

Also, listen to and read everything that @jonathanrheaps.bsky.social puts out. If I have done anything well, it is in significant part due to what I've learned from Jon (and others, of course, too).

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

A group of my undergrads who met weekly at my house to discuss theology over the past two years and read most of the book have reported it has had similar effects on them.

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

My Father-in-Law, a certified Spiritual Director with a DMin and 30 yrs experiencing teaching Greek and New Testament--but no experience with Lonergan--read the entirety of (the penultimate) draft of my primer (which is full of technical stuff) and now reports a deep desire to engage Lonergan.

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