Friday, January 23, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 4


According to President Obama’s State of the Union Address this past Tuesday (which we missed to attend a talk on the fiftieth anniversary of the issuance of Nostra Ætate, the encyclical on Catholic relations with non-Christian religions, below), everything is great, great, great.  The economy is booming, evidently there’s no terrorist threat, and so on, so forth.

Here’s what’s going on in the real world:

Rabbi Kranz, Bishop Knestout, Rabbi Skorka
• Thanks to the initiative displayed by past CESJ board member Harriet Epstein, we were made aware of an event to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the encyclical Nostra Ætate being co-sponsored by the Jewish Community of Greater Washington and the Washington Archdiocese on Tuesday, January 20, 2015.  The event was a conversation between auxiliary Bishop Barry Knestout of Washington, and Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Buenos Aires, “the Pope’s Rabbi.”  The evening went well, and a brief report will be posted on Monday on this blog.

Me, Dr. Kurland, Ms. Epstein, Rabbi Kranz
• Unofficial reports of the numbers at the annual March for Life here in Washington, DC, range from 400,000 to 700,000.  There are no official reports.  Evidently both the government and the media largely missed the fact that anywhere from half a million to nearly three-quarters of a million people came to town; the Washington Post buried a story on page A6, and described the crowd as “tens of thousands,” misplacing a decimal or two.  This does not bode well for national security, as half a dozen terrorists aren’t anywhere near as noticeable as half a million people.  Of course, the government and the media only view people in the Pro-Life movement as a threat on election day.  They can be ignored for the rest of the year because individuals in the movement lack capital ownership, and thus power, and can safely be ignored.

Family meeting ... or Meeting of Families?
• This past Monday was the quarterly board meeting of CESJ.  Attendance was down due to the three-day weekend, but some important items were discussed.  Much of the discussion focused on preparing for the upcoming World Meeting of Families.

• Astrid, the CESJ fellow from Belgium who is currently working on a Masters degree from the University of Louwen there, will be visiting Northern Virginia for two weeks in February.  We expect to follow up on some of the political contacts she made while here on previous visits.

• CESJ is considering applications from two potential interns, one from Brigham Young University, and the other from Yale.  CESJ has been fortunate in the consistently high level of interns, fellows, and volunteers that have come to the organization.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 46 different countries and 52 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, Greece, and India. The most popular postings this past week were “The Purpose of Production,” “Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” “Where Men are Men,” “What’s Wrong with the Pro-Life Movement?” and “Standards, II: What are Standards?”

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#