Last week we had a retrospective on
the news items from January through June of 2015. Today we present the big news items from July
through December 2015. As you can see,
the year got off to a slow start, but a large number of projects came to
fruition (or at least started to bud) in the second half of the year:
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| Turn my frown upside down and contribute! |
• Amazon Smile
program. Here (once
again) are the instructions for using the Amazon Smile program. It’s pretty easy, but you have to follow the
directions exactly, or CESJ won’t get the 0.5% of your net purchase(s) as your donation
(it adds up). First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go. That’s it.
Oh, and be sure to share this information with your friends and
neighbors.
• We were saddened to report the passing of long-time member
and friend of CESJ, Dr. Kathy Friedman, on August 13, 2015. Kathy had fought a six-month battle with
cancer after it was first diagnosed in February. Kathy joined CESJ in 1986, when she was
working in the office of U.S. Representative Louis Stokes (D-OH). She had
learned of the President Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Task Force on Project
Economic Justice, a congressionally mandated bipartisan task force that had
been spearheaded by CESJ members in 1985.
Kathy assisted the Task Force as an editorial advisor for its
orientation book, Every Worker an Owner, which was translated into
Polish with 40,000 copies distributed through the Polish Solidarity network and
later presented to Pope John Paul II. She
contributed an article, “Capital Credit: The Ultimate Right of Citizenship,” to
the compendium Curing World Poverty: The New Role of Property,
co-published by Social Justice Review and CESJ in 1994. Kathy earned her undergraduate degree from
Cornell University, and her graduate degree in sociology from the University of
North Carolina. Her Ph.D. thesis, Legitimation of Social Rights
and the Western Welfare State: A Weberian Perspective, was published by the
University of North Carolina Press. She
taught at the University of Washington and Tulane University. Following her tenure on Capital Hill, Kathy
had a long and productive career at the U.S. Census Bureau. Kathy moved to Lake
Placid, New York, following her retirement. She remained a close friend to
other “CESJ old-timers”, and followed our Just Third Way news with enthusiastic
interest and continued commitment.
• Krzysztof Nędzyński of the
National Bank of Poland asked permission to condense and translate Michael D.
Greaney’s series of blog postings on the Greek debt crisis, which he said is
the best thing by far he has seen written on the subject, for publication in
the Financial Observer in September of 2015.
Publication was delayed until October.
We still plan on translating and editing Krzysztof’s article to produce
a “master” English version, and have it translated into a number of languages
for distribution to central bankers, politicians, and placed in financial
journals. We might be able to get the
funds for translation from foundations using Foundation Search. CESJ Fellow Jean-Marie Bukuru has expressed
interest in providing a French version to the nascent resistance movement in
Burundi, and it might be useful in Guatemala and other places.
• CESJ’s Director of Research, Michael D. Greaney, began
publishing articles on the “Catholic365” website. Due to the press of business and other
responsibilities, only half a dozen articles have been submitted and published,
but more will be forthcoming as soon as time and resources permit.
• Eric Stetson was hired as a media consultant to assist
CESJ in getting more effective use of the social media. To date, efforts to increase the number of
Twitter followers have been very successful.
• A CESJ team manned a booth at the World Meeting of
Families in Philadelphia in September.
It went very well, and a substantial amount of material was distributed,
mostly the “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way” article from Homiletic and Pastoral Review, the CESJ descriptive brochure, the
Capital Homesteading flyer, and hundreds of bookmarks with the Just
Third Way Edition of Fulton Sheen’s Freedom
Under God on one side, and Capital
Homesteading for Every Citizen on the other. A number of good contacts were made, notably
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, whose booth was right next to that of
CESJ.
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| Abraham, the Father of Nations |
• The CESJ core group met with Professor Zaid Eyadat of
Jordan University, founding Dean of the Prince Hussen Bin
Abdullah II School of International Studies and Political Science there. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Center
for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and
Professor-in-Residence of Political Science and Human Rights at the University
of Connecticut. Dr. Eyadat expressed interest in the
Abraham Federation concept as a way of integrating the legitimate interests
of the three great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to build
a peaceful and solidaristic society in the Middle East, without any individual
or group taking unfair advantage of the others.
Dr. Eyadat also thought that the
Citizens Land Bank proposal holds a great deal of promise. Dr. Eyadat was
also intrigued by the “Justice Classrooms” concept, especially as a way of
teaching fundamental moral and ethical values (e.g., truth, beauty, love, and — of course — justice), thereby
laying the groundwork to their restoration to the surrounding culture, turning
academia from the source of the problem into the solution.
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| Fr. Edward Krause |
• Michael D.
Greaney attended the Notre Dame Glee Club Centennial at the University of Notre
Dame. While there, he had a meeting with
Dr. Ryan Madison, Associate Director of the
Center for Ethics and Culture.
Father Edward Krause arranged the meeting. The meeting appears to have gone well, and
Dr. Madison said he would be interested in having the Center for Ethics and
Culture work with CESJ.
• Mark Gross, editor of Truth Be Told, the
newsletter of the Laity of the Province of
the Holy Name of Jesus, is working on getting CESJ into Catholic
media and has suggested a number of contacts for outreach.
• Through Mark, CESJ connected with Dr. Anthony Esolen,
Professor of Renaissance Literature at Providence College in Rhode Island, who
is the author of Reclaiming
Catholic Social Teaching (2014), which we plan on reviewing in a future
blog posting. Dr. Esolen’s position
sounds very close to the Just Third Way, needing only the concept of future
savings to finance capital acquisition by every child, woman, and man, and the
act of social justice as analyzed by CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree,
S.M., Ph.D.
• CESJ’s Director of Research, Michael D. Greaney, was
elected to the membership of the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas in
Chicago, co-founded by Max Weismann and Mortimer Adler, mostly for his research
into Adler’s proposals for the reform of academia.
• CESJ has collected some valuable research materials on and
by G.K. Chesterton, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Abp. Fulton J. Sheen, and Mortimer J.
Adler that corroborate and provide support for the Just Third Way.
#30#
