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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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#