As of this writing,
the stock market is soaring like an eagle on the news that 255,000 jobs were
“created” in July (which begs the question of how many jobs were
“destroyed”). For some strange reason,
however, the “unemployment rate” (which really doesn’t measure the unemployment
rate) stayed constant at an alleged 4.9%.
Does that mean that as many jobs were “created” as were
“destroyed”? Does it mean anything at
all?
Well, if you want
something that means something, here are this week’s news items:
• While waiting for the Diocese of
Arlington to give the imprimatur to Easter
Witness (below) — evidently books by interfaith publishers, even if the
principles of Catholic social teaching are integral to the book (hey, all we
want is to be able to reassure our readers that we aren’t saying something
about what the Catholic Church believes that the Catholic Church in reality
disagrees with) are not a high priority — we submitted another manuscript. Our theory is that if they see another book
in the queue they might speed up the process to avoid a backlog. This one, however, has a more obvious
“Catholic” orientation . . . although it is based on the natural law, so it
applies across the board to any Aristotelians and Thomists out there, Jew,
Muslim, Christian, Holy Momzer, or whatever.
We call it Letter to a Catholic
Lawyer: Setting the Record Straight.
Basically, it’s a response to the criticism that because CESJ is not a
Catholic or even (strictly speaking) a religious organization, we have no right
to present our interpretation of what we think the Catholic Church teaches as
universally true . . . on anything. Even
if we agree with it. The book grew out
of a response to a Catholic attorney, prominent in pro-life circles, who
objected to our pamphlet, Supporting
Life: The Case for a Pro-Life Economic Agenda (2010) on the grounds
that 1) You guys aren’t Catholic and aren’t allowed to talk about the natural
law. 2) You guys aren’t Catholic and
aren’t allowed to talk about economic justice.
3) You guys aren’t Catholic and aren’t allowed to be pro-life. Actually, the last criticism is (in a twisted
kind of way) almost legitimate. CESJ is
not “pro-life.” It isn’t “pro-choice”
either. CESJ members are both pro-life and pro-choice. All CESJ did as CESJ was to say, “Here’s what one of our members thinks is a
solution to the problem that might be acceptable to both ‘sides,’ framed within
the context of the Just Third Way.”
• Another project, dealing in part
with what happened to the understanding of economic and social justice, as well
as distributive and commutative justice, is sixty percent complete. This, too, since it deals with how we
understand the natural law teachings of the Catholic Church, will be submitted
for an imprimatur. (At this rate, not
only are they going to have a huge backlog of manuscripts from one of the
world’s smallest publishers, they are going to have more non-Catholic books
with imprimaturs than they’ve ever given to Catholic books! — it is their
Church, however, and we want to be certain we don’t say anything they believe
is contrary to what they really teach.
You’d think they’d be pleased that people, especially non-Catholics,
want to make certain they get it right before broadcasting it hither and
yon.) Perhaps not by coincidence, we’ve
discovered that rather large numbers of people make the same mistake, whether
you’re talking about politics, religion, or the Great Pumpkin, viz., that the natural law must be based
on subjective faith rather than objective reason, and therefore only applies to people you agree with. Consequently, many people have fallen into
the error of what Msgr. Ronald A. Knox called “enthusiasm” or an excess of
charity that causes disunity: people who do not believe as you do have no
rights, and in fact aren’t even fully human or human at all, and you can do
anything to them you like.
• CESJ has submitted a draft
proposal for a co-project with Virginia Tech.
The proposal is from a Just Third Way perspective, of course, which we
believe makes it sufficiently interesting to intrigue people who fund this sort
of thing. We are looking at developing
ways to help countries in Africa (or anywhere else, for that matter) open up
the opportunity and means for every person to be a productive and contributing
member of society. In broad terms, this
means shifting the currency from being backed with government debt (the worst
thing for a currency), to backing it with private sector assets, reforming the
tax system, and making it possible for every person to purchase capital that
pays for itself out of its own future earnings.
• CESJ’s new intern will be
starting later this month. She is
planning on helping with a survey in the Ukraine to gauge how to institute Just
Third Way concepts and programs in the country as a way of establishing and
maintaining (what else?) economic and social justice. Her special area of interest is public policy.
• This past week the number of page
views on this blog hit 300,000, which does not include those from CESJ, which
are not counted in the statistics.
• Plans are being finalized for the
CESJ annual celebration, postponed from April.
The celebration will take place on August 27 in Falls Church, Virginia.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New
Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores. The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount. A full case is twenty-six copies, and
non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover
price on wholesale lots ($416/case).
Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as retailers.
• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it. To participate in the Amazon Smile
program for CESJ, 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.
• As of this
morning, we have had visitors from 40 different countries and 43 states and
provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two
months. Most visitors are from the United States, Germany, the Philippines, the
United Kingdom, and Canada. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “G.K. Chesterton v. Modernism and Socialism,” “Book
Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “A Brief Outline of How to Save
the World (and Other Modest Goals),” “News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 28,” and
“Why Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?”
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#