The new CESJ website is launched! Kudos to CESJ Director of
Communications Dawn K. Brohawn for all her work in bringing this major effort
to fruition. If you go to the CESJ
website and it looks the same as ever, just hit the “refresh” button, and
you’re in for a treat. All of your
existing links should work.
After that, you might still be interested in other news
items:
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| Note the door opener on the right |
• A number of meetings scheduled for this past week did not
come off due to the weather. Fortunately, the meetings were postponed rather
than cancelled. This does, however, tend
to cut in to the news items, since presenting the Just Third Way involves a
great deal of networking. If you want to help advance the Just Third Way, start
opening doors for Norman Kurland to meet and talk with key people and prime
movers. Just two pieces of advice: 1)
Don’t ask us to open the door ourselves; a “third party” endorsement often
works where a direct approach is seen as “self-promotion.” 2) Don’t try to make
the sale yourself (see #1).
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| Fr. Edward McGlynn |
• Word of our research into the “McGlynn Affair” of
1886-1894 is starting to get around.
Even people who take the opposite “side” of the issue have to respect
the hard data and facts we’ve been uncovering — and that might even persuade
them to accept the Just Third Way as a better alternative to achieve economic
justice. Just this past week we were
able to help a prominent georgist with his research by providing access to the
full text of Archbishop Michael Corrigan’s 1886 pastoral on private property.
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| Archbishop Michael Corrigan |
• We have been invited to submit a paper on the Just Third
Way analysis of business crises to a peer-reviewed journal. This could be a major breakthrough in
bettering understanding of the role that widespread capital ownership, monetary
and fiscal policy, and the tax system play in fostering a sound economy and
economic justice.
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| Fr. Isaac Thomas Hecker |
• One of the things we found this past week was a quote from
an article Father Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819-1888), founder of "the Paulists," wrote in 1887 about his
conversion to Catholicism, followed by that of Orestes Brownson. “I had lived
with the Brook Farm Community and with the Fruitlands Community, and before
that had been a member of a Workingman’s party in New York City, in all which
organizations the right of private ownership of property had been a prime
question. . . . But, as for my part, at the time Bishop Fitzpatrick wanted me
to purge myself of communism, I had settled the question in my own mind, and on
principles which I afterwards found to be Catholic. The study and settlement of
the question of ownership was one of the things that led me into the Church,
and I am not a little surprised that what was a door to lead me into the Church
seems at this day to be a door to lead some others out. But when the bishop
attacked me about it, it was no longer with me an actual question. I had
settled the question of private ownership in harmony with Catholic principles,
or I should not have dared to present myself as a convert.” (Quoted in The Life of Father Hecker by Rev. Walter
Elliott, New York: The Columbus Press, 1891.) Interestingly, in the Apostolic
Letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, Pope
Leo XIII condemned a (mis)translation of The
Life of Father Hecker that distorted and changed Hecker’s teachings and the
whole concept of “Americanism.” The
original English version is fine — and has an introduction by the progressive
(not populist) Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918) of St. Paul, Minnesota,
friend of Hecker . . . and Theodore Roosevelt and possibly Judge Grosscup, and
supporter of widespread ownership. And
that “door to lead some others out”?
Hecker was referring to the McGlynn Affair we noted above. Did we mention that the original English
version carries the imprimatur of
Archbishop Michael Corrigan (1839-1902) of New York, on whose watch the whole
McGlynn Affair took place?
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| Orestes A. Brownson |
• A new intern, Leda K., a student at a local university,
started this week. She will be assisting
Dawn K. Brohawn, CESJ’s Director of Communications, to develop social media
strategies in concert with the new CESJ website that was launched today.
• Start making plans to attend the annual Rally at the Fed in April. We’ll let you know more details soon.
• There will be a CESJ Executive Committee meeting on
Monday, February 17, 2014.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 55 different countries and 53 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia, and Canada.
The most popular postings this past week were “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Raw Judicial Power, I: ‘The Beginning of the
Quarrel’,” “What is a ‘Bill of Exchange’?,” 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#
