The events this week have been few
but potentially momentous. It’s always
difficult to report on meetings in which important ideas were discussed, but no
specific actions taken, so we’ll just get right to the news items in brief:
• Last week’s long weekend trip to the University of Notre
Dame was very productive. We had a
series of meetings, notably with Dr. Ryan Madison of the Center for Ethics and
Culture (who said he wanted to collaborate with Justice University), and Fr. Edward Krause, C.S.C., Ph.D. We missed meeting with Dr. Nell Newton, Dean
of the Law School, but she was out of town.
The primary focus of the meetings was how to counter the shift from
reason to faith as the basis of the natural law, and to reintegrate sound
principles of justice back into academia.
As both the solidarist jurist and political scientist Dr. Heinrich
Rommen and the Great Books philosopher Mortimer J. Adler pointed out, shifting
from the Intellect to the Will (from reason to faith) as the basis of the
natural law leads straight to pure moral relativism and totalitarianism.
• The CESJ core group and Justice University team attended an event sponsored by the
National Council of Churches of Christ on Wednesday. A number of potentially valuable contacts
were made, with CESJ’s strength being the ability to show how to achieve
economic justice for all without redistribution or redefining ownership. This was a completely new idea to many of the
participants, a significant number of which seemed to consider seriously the
possibility of achieving justice without undue interference from the State or
changing what it means to own something.
• While at Notre Dame, we met briefly with Mr. John
Dondanville, with whom the CESJ core group had worked to try and present a new
vision for the future of Detroit, Michigan, a few years ago. We also met with some people from Cleveland
who sounded interested in trying to do something in East Cleveland.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 40 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 the Philippines. The
most popular postings this past week were “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean
Green Mother from Outer Space,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” and “News from the Network,
Vol. 8, No. 39.”
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#
