Although summer (especially July) is typically a slow month
around Washington, D.C., things seem to be picking up at CESJ. A number of meetings are being planned, we
have a good fellow from Belgium doing yeoman service, new funding sources are
being explored, and a number of projects are starting to get underway:
• Deacon Joseph Gorini, founder, chairman, and CEO of
Evangelization Enterprises, Inc. (EEI), of which the “public face” is Light and Heat Ministries, Inc.,
and Apostolic Action, Inc. (AAI), is also a board member of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy
(CCC). He has prepared a draft
information sheet on CESJ that has gone to selected members of the CCC board
for review to explore a relationship with CESJ.
• On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, members of the
CESJ and EEI core groups met with Jim A. from Massachusetts to explore areas of
possible collaboration. The meetings
went very well, and a number of specific projects were discussed. During the meeting on Thursday, Father Edward
Krause, CESJ Board of Counselors member and head of the Central Bureau of the Catholic
Central Union of America in St. Louis, called.
A number of potential door-opening suggestions resulted from Father
Krause’s timely call.
• The CESJ fellow from Belgium, Astrid U., has been studying
Just Third Way materials, especially Norman Kurland’s paper, “A New
Look at Prices and Money.” She has
been asking pointed and intelligent questions about the material.
• The Ninth International Conference on Catholic Social
Thought and Business Education, “Prosperity, Poverty, and the Purpose of
Business: Rediscovering Integral Human Development in the Catholic Social
Tradition,” has accepted CESJ Research Director Michael D. Greaney’s paper
proposal, tentatively titled, “Utter Confusion in the Community: How
Misunderstanding of the Natural Law and Say’s Law of Markets Transformed
Church, State, and Family, and Altered the Role of Business in Social Life.” The conference will take place in Manila, the
Philippines, February 26 through 28, 2015, at De La Salle University. CESJ will be investigating the possibility of
obtaining a grant or doing fundraising to finance the trip. The “high end” total cost to attend the
conference could be as much as $25,000, but as low as $5,000 per person. It might be possible to combine conference
attendance in the Philippines with a trip to Perth, Australia for a number of members of the core group, where an associate has been working to introduce the Just Third Way to officials,
academics, and religious leaders.
• Daniel Kurland, a schoolteacher in Fairfax County,
Virginia, who is a strong supporter of the Just Third Way, is seeking funding to purchase 5
Tablets for his special needs students to use in class. As of this morning, the campaign has reached
22.333% of its $1,500 goal. Consider
making a contribution today.
• CESJ has sent a $75,000 “crowd funding” proposal to the
Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Union of America in St. Louis, Missouri,
to finance the completion, editing, publication, and marketing of What Happened to Distributive Justice, a
study of the sea change that took place in both civil society (the State) and
religious society (organized religion, or the Church) in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, and is now affecting domestic society (the
Family). If accepted by the CCVA, its
success will largely depend on CCVA and CESJ members and friends spreading the
word throughout the world principally by means of their social media networks. The crowdfunding service CESJ is
investigating has the capacity to accept donations in U.S., Canadian, and
Australian dollars, as well as Euros and British pounds.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 43 different countries and 48 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “The Purpose of Production,”
“Distributism, Neo-Distributism, and the Just Third Way, V: Neo-Distributism,”
“Pope Francis, Capitalism, and War, I: Can Capitalism Stop War?” “The Hobby
Lobby Jobby,” and “Pope Francis Writes Again, I: “Jobs and Income.”
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#
