The stock market has been all over the map this week. This demonstrates that areas or groups many
people consider to be trendsetters, indicators, leaders, and so on, so forth,
are in reality nothing of the sort. We
include the stock market (which has little or nothing to do with the primary,
productive market), academia (which has almost nothing to do with real
education these days), politics (which has little, if anything to do with what
Aristotle meant by the term) . . . and so on, so forth.
Be that as it may, here’s where the real action is:
• There have been some
unavoidable delays in launching the Campaign for Economic Justice, especially
the crowdfunding phase, which we’ve tentatively given the name, “Five Dollars
for Families” — a bit easier sell than “Billions of Bucks for Our Babies.” We expect this phase to have a slightly
“Catholic” tone, since the immediate goal is to cover the costs of having an
interfaith team at the World Meeting of Families, an event sponsored by the
Catholic Church, but it should appeal to everyone of goodwill who is concerned
with the plight of the family throughout the world today. We hope to generate enough interest with
small donations so that big donors will be interested.
• Demonstrating the
ease with which anything based on the natural law can be (and is)
misunderstood, “the Republican Party” (meaning some liberal reporter’s idea of what a
few conservative people in the G.O.P. might be thinking . . . if reporters or politicians actually could think. . . .) is now “at
war with the pope.” The real
importance of the article, frankly, is to demonstrate just how far out of touch
both the media and the politicians are with what is really happening in the
world, and what people really think and believe. Once the media and the politicians learn
about — and understand — the Just Third Way, then such articles will likely go
into the dustbin of history.
• The CESJ core group is planning on attending a
presentation — a conversation between Rabbi Dr. Abraham Skorka and Bishop Barry
Knestout on the encyclical Nostra Ætate
(“The Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions”) — sponsored by the
Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. The event is Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at Adas
Israel Congregation in downtown Washington, DC, to commemorate (more or less;
it was issued in October 1965) the fiftieth anniversary of the encyclical.
• The “March for Life”
is coming up. Over the years we have
made attempts to suggest that the concerns of both pro-life and pro-choice
people can be addressed with the Just Third Way, but (so far) not too many
people have taken the hint. Of interest
to both sides should be the legal basis on which Roe v. Wade was rendered; there may be serious flaws in both
substantive and procedural law that nobody is addressing. For example, the decision was based in part
on the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873. As
William Crosskey analyzed the decision, however, “So, the Court’s
opinion in the Slaughter-House Cases was,
undoubtedly, most craftily written; written so as to enable the Court, with a
good face, in future cases, to jump either way: to observe the intended meaning
of the Privileges and Immunities Clause if that seemed unavoidable, or, in the
alternative, to destroy the clause utterly if this seemed safe. And the fact that this elaborate preparation
was made also means that the majority Justices saw and fully comprehended the
possibility of the intermediate, plain, and sensible meaning of the Privileges
and Immunities Clause here expounded, to which, indeed, Justice Bradley called
attention, in his dissenting opinion. So,
the majority must, as the minority charged, already have determined, if they dared, to destroy this new
provision of the Constitution [i.e.,
the Fourteenth Amendment] completely.” (William
Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution
in the History of the United States. Chicago, Illinois: The University of
Chicago Press, 1953, 1130.).
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 44 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, Canada, India, and Russia. The most
popular postings this past week were “Book Review: The Field Guide for a Hero’s
Journey,” “Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” “The Purpose
of Production,” “Where Men are Men,” and “Solidarism, I: Origin.”
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#