This week is a little week — three business days — as well
as a little weak for news. Major
holidays tend to do that. One thing that
seems to be coming to the fore as the year draws to a close is that people are
starting to get a clue that, perhaps, the State might not be the best way of
meeting everybody’s material and spiritual needs. Much of this is due to the confusion over the
Affordable Care Act, and wondering whether it will survive its implementation.
Be that as it may, here’s some thoughts on a few events of
the past week:
• President Obama has praised Pope Francis as “an
‘extraordinarily thoughtful’ messenger of ‘peace and justice’,”
stressing the “common ground” that he, Obama, evidently wasn’t able to find
with Pope Benedict XVI, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, or a cast of thousands of other
American clerics and Catholic laity a trifle upset over the president’s unique
approach to the determination of religious truth and practice. To do Mr. Obama justice, however, he is no
more confused than many Catholics over the respective roles of Church and
State, and the meaning of such things as social justice and human rights. In common with many others, the president has
mistaken the pope’s emphasizing the dire need for drastic measures to address
the global economic emergency, for a “solution” that destroys the whole concept
of justice and right, and even what it means to be human.
• We had an interesting discussion this past week on how
Aristotle viewed non-owning free workers.
As far as the Philosopher was concerned, wage workers are worse off than
actual slaves — they are “masterless slaves,” pathetic creatures who own no
capital. That makes it all the more
baffling why modern academia sells itself by insisting that the goal of a “good
education” is to get “a good job.” In
other words, the goal of education is to train people to be good slaves.
• We’ve been researching the roots of what happened to the
understanding of distributive justice and social justice. We have been finding some of the most
astonishing things that contradict much of what is “known” as “fact” today —
old newspapers from the 1880s to the 1940s are a gold mine. Take, for instance, the case of an individual
who claimed he was being persecuted for his political views when he had never,
ever, participated in any political activity . . . and made this statement less
than a week after he was elected state delegate to the annual convention of a
political party . . . .
• The big news is still that Freedom Under God is available after nearly three-quarters of a
century. CESJ is now taking bulk/wholesale orders (please, no individual
sales). The per unit price for ten or
more copies is $16.00 (20% discount). Shipping
is extra. Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org”
stating how many copies you want and the street address (no P. O. Boxes) where
you want them delivered. We will get
back to you with the total cost, how to pay, and estimated delivery time. All payments must be made in advance, and
orders are placed only after payment clears.
Individual copies are available from Amazon
and Barnes and Noble,
as well as by special order from many bookstores.
• CESJ offers a 10%
commission on the retail cover price on bulk sales of publications. If you broker a deal with, for example, a
school or civic organization that buys a publication in bulk (i.e., ten copies or more of a single
title), you receive a commission once a transaction has been completed to the
satisfaction of the customer. Thus, if
you get your club or school to purchase, say, ten cases of Freedom Under God (280 copies) or any other CESJ or UVM
publication, the organization would pay CESJ $3,920.00 (280 copies x $20 per
copy, less a 30% discount), plus shipping (the commission is calculated on the
retail cost only, not the shipping). You would receive $560.00. Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for copies of flyers of CESJ and
UVM publications. (CESJ project
participants and UVM shareholders are not
eligible for commissions.)
• So Much Generosity,
the collection of essays about the fiction of Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, John
Henry Cardinal Newman, and Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson by Michael D. Greaney,
CESJ’s Director of Research. The book is
now available on Amazon
and Barnes and Noble,
and is also available on Kindle.
Many of the essays incorporate elements of the Just Third Way. The book is priced at $20.00, and there is a
20% discount on bulk orders (i.e.,
ten or more), which can be ordered by sending an e-mail to publications [at]
cesj [dot] org.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 59 different countries and 54 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada (for some reason no one in Wyoming is reading the blog, and
we lost Alaska) to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and India. The
most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” News from the Network, Vol. 6, No. 48, “Voluntary
Taxation? Not in a Free Society,” and “Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the
Gold Standard?”
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#