As of this writing, the stock market
is waiting with bated breath for the latest decision of the Federal Reserve
over interest rates. It doesn’t matter a
hill of beans, though. No significant
amount of credit is being channeled to the primary productive market, and none
at all to making ordinary people productive through capital ownership. Instead, it’s all going to bolster stock
prices which bear less and less resemblance to reality every day.
Back in the real world:
• We are still working out the details needed to launch a
major fundraising drive for CESJ to get the resources to translate a number of
significant articles (e.g., “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way”) and other material that present concepts
that are key to solving the increasing number of crises in the world. This will be geared toward obtaining grants
from foundations, and not from the general public, at least at this stage, and
not for at least a year and a half. This
may be launched before the end of our fiscal year on September 30, and we could
be seeing results as early as January of 2016.
Of particular interest will be CESJ co-founder William J. Ferree’s key
pamphlet Introduction to Social Justice
(1948), and the Just Third Way Edition of Fulton Sheen’s Freedom Under God (1940). We’re starting small, though, to test the
waters, so to speak, and are looking initially at more translations of “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way” and the paper on the Greek debt crisis
currently being edited by an official with the National Bank of Poland,
scheduled for publication this month.
We’ve also asked Joe Recinos for a list of materials he would find
useful in educating people about the Just Third Way if translated into Spanish.
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| Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
• CESJ’s definition of social justice will be used in an
upcoming textbook to be published in 2017 by Jones & Bartlett Learning, an
affiliate of Ascend Learning Company, and with permission to include the
definition in other works — at no cost, of course (CESJ does not charge others
for promoting CESJ’s materials — as long as they know about it and are notified
in advance). This is not the first time
CESJ’s definition of social justice has been used in a text, so it must be
getting around in academic circles to some degree: “A virtue that guides us in
creating those organized human interactions we call institutions. In turn, social institutions, when justly
organized, provide us with access to what is good for the person, both
individually and in our associations with others. Social justice also imposes on each of us a
personal responsibility to work with others to design and continually perfect
our institutions as tools for personal and social development.” For a more in-depth treatment of social
justice, download a free copy of Introduction
to Social Justice by CESJ co-founder, Father William J. Ferree.
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| "The Eyes Have It" |
• We are developing a special advertising bookmark to take
to the World Meeting of Families. One
side will have a description of Freedom
Under God with ordering information for individual and bulk sales, and the
other will have Capital Homesteading for
Every Citizen, again with ordering information. We will be distributing the bookmarks and
other free materials instead of selling anything due to the complicated
requirements for obtaining a “transient vendor’s license” in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania; we thought that filling out 28 pages of forms was not a good
use of our time. As an added benefit,
anyone who wants to order bookmarks in bulk for their own marketing efforts can
let us know, and we’ll order some for you.
There’s a minimum 25 per order . . . which costs around 75¢ per
bookmark, so we’re ordering 2,000 for ourselves which brings the price down to
about 5¢ each. If you would like to
promote other CESJ publications using bookmarks, let us know which one(s), and
we can come up with a design for a small charge. Send any enquiries to publications [at] cesj
[dot] org. (We’ll also do the same for
books published by Universal Values Media, Inc., as long as you don’t combine
books from the two publishers on the same bookmark.)
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 49 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, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and India. The most
popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green
Mother from Outer Space,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “The Purpose of
Production,” “Flexible Standards, II: Making Money,” and “How to Cause (and
Cure) a Great Depression.”
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#