Friday, January 11, 2013

News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 02


Not to worry.  Scientists have let us know that the asteroid Apophis (which sounds suspiciously like the name of the super-villain Apothis from Stargate SG-1) will not be hitting Earth in twenty years or so.  We can get back to worrying about the economy, the size of the national debt, and the ever-growing Social Security funding deficit that was recently estimated at $84 trillion.

 That being the case, it’s a good thing the Just Third Way movement is making some progress:

• A meeting to plan for the upcoming Rally at the Fed was held today.  As 2013 is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve Act, these will be a special focus of the event.

• Guy S. in Iowa, who recently sent CESJ a copy of Fulton Sheen’s book, God and Intelligence (1925), with an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, has been surfacing a great deal of material from Bishop Sheen.  His latest “discovery” is a copy of the “Baccalaureate Sermon” then-Monsignor Sheen gave at the 97th Annual Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame du Lac on June 1, 1941.  The subject of the sermon was that the decline of patriotism in America is directly linked to a decline in religion.

• Mark G. editor of Truth Be Told, the newsletter of the Dominican Western Province, is sending CESJ a rare copy of Bishop Sheen’s book, Whence Come Wars (1940).  Much of Bishop Sheen’s thought in politics and philosophy appears to be very consistent with the principles of the Just Third Way.

• A short “Justice University” article on harmony and economic justice was submitted to Dr. Leo Semashko, president of the Global Harmony Association headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia.

• Sales of In Defenseof Human Dignity (2008) have quadrupled in January from the previous month, suggesting that people are beginning to investigate alternatives to the current system more seriously.  The majority of the copies seem to have been “special ordered” from local bookstores instead of being purchased through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

• Sales of TheRestoration of Property: A Reexamination of a Natural Right (2012) are also on the rise, possibly for similar reasons.

• Elli St. George Godfrey, a business coach in Boston, has expressed interest in the Just Third Way and its application to specific business situations.  Her show is #Kaizenbiz, and can be accessed on Tweetchat.  Her website is http://kaizenbiz.com/, and she may be interviewing Norman Kurland on Tweetchat in the near future.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 49 different countries and 51 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Ireland. People in Mexico, Malta, Nepal, Qatar, and the United States spent the most average time on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Islamic Banking,” “Is Choice Unconstitutional?,” and “News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 1.”

Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we know about.  If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.”  If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them to us to post for you.  All comments are moderated anyway, so we’ll see it before it goes up.

#30#