John Krambuhl
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johnkrambuhl.bsky.social
John Krambuhl
@johnkrambuhl.bsky.social
EdD🍎| Spiritual Exercises, Metacognition, Institutional Analysis | Cor ad cor loquitur
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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.
November 14, 2025 at 11:11 PM
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.
Balthasar, Theo-Logic vol. 1.

He wants to maintain a notion of truth. He doesn’t want that notion to mean domination.
November 25, 2025 at 12:45 AM
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.
November 23, 2025 at 8:02 PM
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?...
November 22, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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.
CFP: "Belief: Still Today's Issue," The International Institute for Method in Theology's Spring Colloquium. March 6-7, 2026 at Marquette University.

Submissions due Dec. 1
November 20, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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.
November 15, 2025 at 10:35 PM
“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
“Against such reorganization of the patterns of the subject, there come into play all of the conservative forces that give our lives their continuity and their coherence. The subject's fundamental anxiety, his deepest dread, is the collapse of himself and his world.” - Fr Lonergan
November 13, 2025 at 1:48 AM
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.
"In the flow of consciousness there is not only the subjective side, what concerns me, but also its correlative, one's world. But what is one's world? It is the organized whole of intelligibly varying objects in which I happen to have any interest, for which I have any concern."

Bernard Lonergan
November 12, 2025 at 10:59 PM
“[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.
November 11, 2025 at 5:43 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
“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
October 30, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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.
November 10, 2025 at 3:22 PM
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.
November 8, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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.
November 3, 2025 at 3:09 PM
“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?...
John Henry Newman is now a Doctor of the Church – VIDEO
YouTube video by ROME REPORTS in English
youtu.be
November 1, 2025 at 8:12 PM
“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
October 30, 2025 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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...
The Way to Nicaea Symposium
YouTube video by Seton Hall University
www.youtube.com
October 28, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
fyi, the “personal response to personal address” thing is Balthasar’s most typical condensation of Ignatian spirituality
“Man, to be whole, must make himself…the answering word. In order to affirm himself, in order to advance to the fullest consciousness of himself, he must express himself toward God as he whom God has created in love and addressed.”
October 28, 2025 at 9:46 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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:
October 27, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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
The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea: Hemmer, Ryan: 9781978715271: Amazon.com: Books
The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea [Hemmer, Ryan] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea
a.co
October 27, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
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...
June 7, 2024 at 9:08 AM
🔥 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,
I don’t feel strongly enough about baseball for the amount of energy people have about my one post about baseball.
October 26, 2025 at 1:00 PM
🤔 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. 🥋
This is canon to me now. It’s too fun.
October 18, 2025 at 2:19 PM
Reposted by John Krambuhl
“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
October 16, 2025 at 9:39 PM
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
You shoulda read all the sentences I wrote and deleted today trying to describe the objectivity of a correct judgment. Miserable. Then I thought I said a cool thing about God and I read the next paragraph in Lonergan just to be sure and that paragraph basically meant “that cool thing is wrong.”
October 13, 2025 at 9:06 PM
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
October 13, 2025 at 6:40 PM