Truly moving: the willingness to be vulnerable and the sincerity of heart in the people interviewed here. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

“He who is anxious thinks of himself, is suspicious of danger, speaks hurriedly, and has no time for the interests of others; he who lives in peace is at leisure wherever his lot is cast. Such is the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart.” - St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church, Pray for us.

It’s so good:

“When one no longer distinguishes between revelation and culture, then culture takes on an exaggerated importance. Losing hold of culture comes to mean endangering the gospel itself. Culture becomes a series of answers rather than an open question emerging from the hearts of human beings…

If we get to reality beyond appearances by following our desire for the truth to adequate understanding, then our native notion of being is also of the good & the true. Consequently, being indifferent to the good also makes you indifferent to the truth, & so evil is always also stupid.

Here we go, friends. www.commonwealmagazine.org/carpenter-an...

"But to the degree the absurd creeps in, love is replaced by hatred, virtue by vice, good institutions by instruments of wickedness, cooperation by strife, action by inertia... This is why St. Augustine referred to great empires as larceny on a grand scale." Bernard Lonergan

Whenever I am sad I remember that Arthur Schopenhauer Loved the flute And everyday he played The operas of Rossini Specially arranged For solo flute. And then I am happy again.

But all of them would have one subject, desire, If only my own—but no, not at all; alas, I was driven because I wanted to be like others. I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me. The history of my stupidity will not be written. For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

This is one of the many oversights of understanding that Lonergan diagnosed: the scientist’s tendency to forget that moving from their abstract modeling to the concrete situation always require at least one further insight.

Lonerganian self-appropriation as an iterative enhancing intelligent toggle between Leib und Korper.

Looking for a holiday present for someone interested in 20th century Catholic metaphysical controversies? Let me suggest my book, *The Ambiguity of Being: Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural* www.cuapress.org/978081323804...

If you want to discuss Balthasar's Theo-Drama 4 with me still, how's a January schedule look? Below, I've split it into its 4 major parts. Let me know if you're - interested - would like some kind of "live" discussion (ie, Zoom) Let's think apocalyptically about human action together! Or not!

Lazy Sunday

Fr Doran was right tho: there’s a psychological element that has to get integrated or the intellectual principles won’t get a chance

My book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom, and all @islandpress.bsky.social e-books, is on sale for $6.99 through 12/19. Ostrom's groundbreaking ideas showed that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable. Communities can sustain their shared resources through collective action. 1/2

For example: “God takes the stage in the same revelatory mode as any other character that steps out from behind the curtain… Consequently, God’s pure act that is triune life distills into discrete performances on the world stage and so takes on the temporality of worldliness.” (Ibid)

“Rather than articulate a tight…solution, [for von Balthasar] drama presents an alternative framework that holds fate and freedom in the dramatic tension of providential love. The confrontation between fate and freedom happens in God’s action toward and for the world.” (133).

CFP: The West Coast Methods Institute (WCMI) Annual Meeting Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. April 23-25, 2026 THEME: The Idea of the University Today: Newman, Lonergan, & Higher Education

"Spontaneously, naturally, your ideal of knowledge will govern your attempts at self-appropriation, and unless your ideal is perfectly correct before you start, it will prevent you from arriving. In other words, there is the need of some sort of a jump, a leap.” - Lonergan

“[I]n all one's questions, and all one's efforts to know, one is presupposing some ideal of knowledge, more or less unconsciously perhaps… our concern in *Insight* is a series of exercises in which we move towards the functionally operative tendencies that ground the ideal of knowledge." - Lonergan

Lonerganiacs out there: After reading the 1958 essay “The Redemption” what do you recommend as helpful follow up reading to further flesh out the meaning of the redemption? By Lonergan, secondary scholarship, or other thinkers?

"Mutual self-mediation provides the inexhaustible theme of dramatists and novelists. It is also the imponderable in education that does not show up in charts and statistics, that lies in the immediate interpersonal situation

I love the way scholarship, art, and existential concern layer in this book toward emergent answers: “What is *reality*? So also, what is *history*? And what does it mean, if it is possible, to *speak* either of these? And then, what does it mean to *act* in them?” - @catholickungfu.bsky.social

Did you guys know the BC quarterback’s name is Lonergan? and check out the headline!! www.si.com/college/bost...

One of the awesome things about Lonergan’s cognitional theory is the way it can engage, incorporate, and enhance social science. The initial audience for this is likely tiny. But if, for instance, Catholic education adapts the framework I believe its fruits will be abundant in research and practice.

Responsibly serving the process of another’s relationship with Christ, and thereby their living and memorable discoveries of beauty, goodness, and truth, is exactly the disposition St Ignatius counsels for a giver of the Spiritual Exercises. And the giver must also always be open to being surprised.

If I ever get to spend a whole day with the Pope we’re gonna watch Field of Dreams, play catch, and then go sing some karaoke.

Imo Andy Goldsworthy’s art is a memorable and prophetic expression of this wisdom. Here is a fast taste though the longer form documentaries out there on him are more true to embodying the wisdom. youtu.be/sngXz55b4bc?...

As the deadline approaches, do please share this around. If you'd prefer a .pdf, DM me a good email and I can provide that too.

All @islandpress.bsky.social books are HALF PRICE through Sunday, 11/16 including my book, The Uncommon Knowledge of Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom's ideas are about more than just environmental commons. They are about the heart of democracy and self-governance - ideas that are incredibly relevant today.

“To what other aspect of ourselves and of our world is the memory of Jesus *dangerous* except to that dimension that has given rise to the longer cycle of decline?” - Fr Doran

More wisdom from this chapter: “[W]ith regard to the philosophy of education itself, the fundamental problem is the horizon of the educationalist - of the person or group that has the power and the money, that runs the bureaucracy, that makes the decisions - and the horizon of the teacher.

“[I]ngratitude is the most abominable of sins… for it is a forgetting of the graces, benefits, and blessings received.“ - St. Ignatius Loyola “If our heart could truly grasps what God is doing for us, how could we sin? We would be too grateful to sin.” - David Fleming, S.J.

“How you and I conceptualize our relationships with one another and to the world in which we live is, in my judgment, the foundation on which systems of order are constituted in human societies.“ - Vincent Ostrom

Tolkien gave maybe the best answer to all of this in The Silmarillion, where the Creation is a song, and where the discordant music Melkor adds to it gets woven into the music and makes it even better, the way a harsh diminished chord can lead satisfyingly to a harmonic resolution.

Every once and awhile I take a moment to admire this Table of Contents again. It makes me so happy. I’m reading Revelation to get primed!

Theo-Drama 4 really is a lot of fun. I’d be willing to do some kind of Christmas break “course” on it if anyone wants. We can Zoom about it or something.

“If I have acknowledged a profound change in the structure and in the procedure of Catholic theology, I must add that the change envisaged has long been awaited, that it is carefully motivated, that it is substantially limited… youtu.be/iwZJ-v7GX_U?...

“How you and I conceptualize our relationships with one another and to the world in which we live is, in my judgment, the foundation on which systems of order are constituted in human societies.“ - Vincent Ostrom

In case you wanted to watch the livestream of the Lonergan Institute's Way to Nicaea Symposium from last Thursday, you can still find a recording of it up on youtube: www.youtube.com/live/K8Jsuko...

fyi, the “personal response to personal address” thing is Balthasar’s most typical condensation of Ignatian spirituality

In the Topics in Education lectures, Lonergan uses a calculus metaphor to articulate is theory of historical process and Pat Byrne at BC once made a graph to illustrate this idea of the "differentials of the good." I finally went and found it:

Amazon’s selling Ryan Hemmer’s excellent book, The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: a Lonergan Idea, for 75% off a.co/d/5xqbwTn

New paper on the influence of cybernetics - in particular, the work of Ross Ashby - on the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. Now open access in the Journal of Institutional Economics. DOI: doi.org/10.1017/S174...

🔥 For sports lovers, the social institutions of sport often carry root-deep cultural and personal meaning with heavily accented vital and religious energy, e.g., the Patroclus Games in the Iliad, or the Miracle on Ice of the 1980 Winter Olympics. As Catholic missionaries long recognized,

🤔 A rhetorical appreciation: I like how Anne’s brand of earnest irony here reveals what often happens when the illative sense meets the sense of humor and fun, and then how, upon reflection, humor and fun are leveraged to return us to a more full and earnest illative. 🥋

“Human science wants to be a science of prediction… (not) a moral science that would exhibit to free people their choices… & leave them to choose. It wants to conceive people as atoms, find out the forces that move them, & predict what they will do whether they choose or not.” Bernard Lonergan

A relatedly cool sentence which might be wrong: “I naturally believe that every genuine act of human creativity is simultaneously an innovation and a discovery, a marriage of poetic craft and contemplative vision that captures

This sentence comparing the intelligibility of mathematical limits and statistical probabilities triggers an insight in me that I needed but was woefully missing when I took calculus and statistics in undergrad. “[J]ust as intelligence can reach a limit by grasping that there is