We had a telephone conversation
earlier today with Father Edward Krause, C.S.C., Ph.D., a member of CESJ’s
Board of Counselors in residence at the University of Notre Dame in northern
Indiana. Despite being isolated in the
wilds of academia, he has been able to insert ideas of the Just Third Way into
some discussions.
• It's not a Justice University program per se (Justice University didn't produce it, but can "borrow" it) but episodes of Father Krause’s series on EWTN, Becoming
Catholic, are available as free audio downloads from the EWTN
website. Obviously, much of the material
is not directly related to the Just Third Way, but people of all faiths and
philosophies should find some of the programs both interesting and useful, e.g., in these days of rampant divorce
and changes in the meaning of basic terms, marriage as a “vocation,” that is, a
calling in itself that requires work and effort, not just something that
happens spontaneously. The ninth
episode, “The
Moral Imperatives of Any Faith,” is actually a discussion of the
Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of the natural law, something we’ve
discussed at length on this blog. As the
blurb says, “Fr. Krause talks about how Morality is objective, and perceived by
the Conscience through Natural Law.” The
twelfth episode, “The Eighth
Commandment and the Media,” also looks interesting: “Fr. Krause talks about
how bearing false witness has affected society today, on a small scale and a
larger scale with the media.” The
entire series is also available on DVD (for a price) for those who want to
see Father Krause’s smiling face.
• Unfortunately, Father Krause was not able to attend the
annual conference of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists due to a scheduling
conflict. As Chaplain, he was planning
on distributing copies of CESJ’s recent article, “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way” for study and commentary. Of course, there is nothing preventing
anyone, even a Catholic social scientist, from visiting the Homiletic and Pastoral Review website
and reading the article for him- or herself. . . .
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| Father Matthew Habiger, O.S.B., Ph.D. |
• During the conversation, Father Krause again raised the
issue of how to secure the economic and (at this point) political independence
of the Family. As Father Matthew
Habiger, O.S.B., Ph.D., former head of Human Life International and current
CESJ Board of Counselors member, always reminds us, strong families require a
solid economic foundation, and the Just Third Way is (again, at this point) the
only game in town. Dr. Norman Kurland
noted that, despite the shape academia is in (and is the source of many of the
problems the world faces — cf. C.S. Lewis’s The
Abolition of Man and That Hideous
Strength for a non-fiction and fictional treatment of this, respectively),
it only needs a few people to start the process of reform . . . if they start
from the right principles. The civil
rights movement in the early 1960s, in which Norm played a part, was a case in
point.
• The "Justice University" blog series, “Three Key Books on Common Sense” has
proved astonishingly popular, and has received some very positive commentary
(and some rather diversionary but thankfully irrelevant and immaterial negative
commentary as well). Noted Catholic
commentator Father C. John McCloskey III, now in California (we met with him in
Chicago a few years ago) stated he agreed with the series, while Max Weismann,
co-founder with Mortimer J. Adler of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas in Chicago, and Justice University faculty member has been very enthusiastic . . . as we might expect, due to
our reliance on Aristotelian-Thomism and Adler’s analysis of modern
philosophical errors (especially in academia).
The series is now in its second phase, covering Msgr. Ronald Knox’s
book, Enthusiasm (1950), which seems
to explain a lot of what can only be called “nuttiness” so prevalent in the
modern world. It will conclude with a
look at Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s book, God
and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925), having started with G.K.
Chesterton’s Saint Thomas Aquinas: The
“Dumb Ox” (1933). A number of people
have suggested that the series be turned into a book at the earliest
opportunity.
• This past week CESJ sponsored a luncheon for M. Jean-Marie
Bukuru of Burundi, his family, and his “patron” in the United States. Jean-Marie, a Fulbright Scholar and Hubert
Humphrey Fellow, negotiated a multinational water rights treaty covering the
Nile River Basin, and will be working to implement a Just Third Way program of
resource management and economic development once the political situation is
settled and it is safe to return to Burundi.
Naturally, “a good time was had by all,” and the special chicken and
mushrooms with yellow rice was a particular success — perhaps one day we can put
together that “Just Third Way Cookbook” someone suggested a while back.
• The CESJ core group will be attending the Law and Justice
symposium the week of November 16th at the World Bank.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 52 different countries and 49 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 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,” “Three Key Books on Common Sense, XI:
The Awful Apparition of Aristotle,” 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.
#30#