News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 43

Accurate information about the Just Third Way is beginning to filter past the “gatekeepers” in academia and politics.  It seems that the near-total lack of vision in these quarters has caused a number of people to start thinking outside the box.  The signs that people are starting to wake up to the potential of the Just Third Way are all there:

Norman G. Kurland

• Dr. Norman Kurland is giving the keynote address this evening at the ESOP Association’s Mid-Atlantic Chapter conference in Charlottesville, Virginia.  Norm will be speaking not merely on the history of the ESOP, but the history of the ESOP concept, and how the basic principles can be applied to help foster economic growth in which every child, woman, and man can participate.

• Jean-Marie Bukuru, CESJ’s Fellow from Burundi, was again interviewed on Voice of America concerning the situation in Burundi and what shape economic development can take once the political situation is stabilized and the current unconstitutional president removed.  Jean-Marie spoke in favor of the Citizens Land Cooperative, by means of which every child, woman, and man could participate directly in the benefits of economic development of land and natural resources, instead of the benefits accruing only to a few.

• We recently got a query from a college student asking how Just Third Way principles could be applied to the refugee crisis and how to respond to a question as to whether the rich are essential in economic growth.  We hope to feature the student’s paper on a future blog series.

Msgr. Ronald Knox, author of Enthusiasm (1950).

• The current blog series on “Three Key Books on Common Sense” (Fulton Sheen's God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, 1925, G.K. Chesterton's St. Thomas Aquinas: The "Dumb Ox", 1933, and Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm, 1950) is exciting quite a bit of commentary, both pro and con, some of which has appeared in the com boxes of the blog.  The positive comments are very positive, but the negative comments do not appear to reflect an adequate understanding of the topic under discussion, using the posting more as a springboard to address the commentator’s own, often completely unrelated interests.  We have suggested in a number of cases that the commentators start their own blogs so they may freely offer their own opinions to the public without attempting to hijack someone else’s forum.

• We were able to send out follow up letters to most of the people we met while attending the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, along with a number of others.  Among them were academics from St. Gregory’s University, Ave Maria University, Notre Dame, Notre Dame-Perth (Australia), John Paul the Great Catholic University, and a number of other organizations, including Priests for Life and Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.  Next week we hope to begin following up on the contacts we made while at Notre Dame, especially the Center for Ethics and Culture, the assistant director of which expressed interest in the Justice University concept, possibly co-sponsoring some programs.

The Mean, Green Mother from Outer Space.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 49 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, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and India. The most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Halloween Horror Special XIII: Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 39,” and “Three Key Books on Common Sense, IV: Chesterton Versus the Slavery of Past Savings.”

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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