Friday, January 16, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 3


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.

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