Friday, August 22, 2014

News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 33


The stock market is, of course, booming, although there doesn’t seem to be much of anything there except a lot of sound and the fury, signifying nothing.  After the event-filled trip to Cleveland, this has been a quiet week for the network:

Thomas Aquinas: the original deep, fat friar.
• We have now obtained copies of all of G.K. Chesterton’s works that are on his “most important” list: Orthodoxy (1908), Saint Francis of Assisi (1924), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926) and Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox” (1933).  Don’t let the titles fool you.  All have variations on the same theme, one that Chesterton reiterated in the introduction he wrote to Fulton Sheen’s first book, God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925): the primacy of the intellect over the will, that is, the need for sound reason as the basis of a truly human society, and for faith to be grounded firmly on reason, i.e., non-contradictory.  In a sense (but only in a sense) these books aren’t really about God and religion at all, but about humanity and the need to approach life in a truly human, that is, rational or common sense, manner.  That is fully consistent with the principles of the Just Third Way and the Core Values of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ).

• The CESJ Fellow, Astrid Uytterhaegen, is making great progress in finishing her reports of the recent trip to Cleveland.  There has also been significant progress in script development and production of three short videos intended to explain the Just Third Way in a 90-second, 3-minute, and 10-minute format.

• The CESJ Core Group is working on scheduling a meeting with CESJ Counselors Father John Trigilio and Deacon Joseph Gorini to strategize on a number of collaborative projects and initiatives.

Now, THAT'S a Political Animal!
• CESJ Director of Research Michael D. Greaney’s next book, The Political Animal, a CESJ Paradigm Paper, is ready to go into prepress cover formatting.  It could be released as early as September 30 or October 1 of this year.  (This is not the in-depth study being done on distributive justice, for which research is still being carried out.)

• We recently reached out to a Thomist philosopher whose orientation seems compatible with that of the Just Third Way — as you might expect from the Just Third Way’s grounding in the work of Mortimer Adler and Father William Ferree.

• All this week the CESJ core group has been feasting on the bounty of Ohio vegetable patches, the result of a generous donation from the Dixon family of Ashtabula.  Of course, we accept more than vegetables; other in-kind donations and (of course) cash is always welcome, although it might not taste quite as good as peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 43 different countries and 46 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, Australia, Canada, and the Philippines. The most popular postings this past week were  “Church, State, and Humanity, III: A Fundamental Change in the Idea of the State,” “The State is God, God is the State, Part VI,” “Church, State, and Humanity, IV: A Fundamental Change in the Idea of Religion,” “Midsummer Tutorial on Social Justice, I: Introduction,” and “News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 30” (containing the week before last’s press release about Father Trigilio and Deacon Gorini joining the CESJ Board of Counselors.)

Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.

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