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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
#30#