A
number of important irons are in the fire as CESJ approaches the end of its
fiscal year (September 30). A lot of
time is taken up with that, of course, but things are also moving forward:
• CESJ had its
monthly executive committee meeting this past Monday. Participants called in from all over the
United States, and one from Guatemala.
The phone-in from India missed the meeting because of a time
miscalculation.
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| It doesn't have to be on a hill, either. |
• The CESJ core group had an in-depth conversation earlier this week with an entrepreneur who has an
interesting idea about how to handle the refugee crisis . . . that doesn’t
involve building walls or shipping them back where they came from. Instead, the idea is to build new communities
of 10-12,000 people each, using new energy technologies and advanced corporate
finance to supply a productive economy that has a net contribution to the
economy instead of a net drain. Citizen
ownership and participation would be key to the concept.
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| Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
• CESJ’s president, Norman Kurland,
had a long talk with a researcher at Dayton University who is interested in
learning more about CESJ and why its co-founder, Father William J. Ferree,
S.M., Ph.D., considered CESJ so important.
Father Ferree believed that virtually everyone had missed the “great
message” of Pope Pius XI’s completed social doctrine: the act of social
justice, and its potential for turning around our entire society — in a just
way for the benefit of all. Combined
with the principles of economic justice discerned by Louis Kelso and Mortimer
Adler, there is the possibility of building a more just and humane future for
everybody, not just a capitalist or socialist élite and their chosen few.
As Father Ferree said when he addressed the Lay Commission on the
Economy in 1984, “our ‘Center for
Economic and Social Justice’ wants to reorient your entire dialogue from
recriminations and defenses for the injustices we have all inherited, to the
justice we can all pursue in this truly historic opportunity. Father Ferree’s pamphlet, Introduction
to Social Justice, can be downloaded free from the CESJ website.
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| No, the other John Sullivan. . . |
• An article on CESJ appeared in yesterday’s issue of The Irish
Rover, an independent student publication at the University of Notre
Dame. Written by a past editor, John
Sullivan, “The Third Way: CESJ and Binary Economics,” gives a pretty good
thumbnail sketch of the thought of Louis Kelso, and suggests it merits
examination as a way in which people in the future can meet their own needs
through their own efforts — not forgetting the need to take care of people now,
of course. There was one small error in
the article, CESJ was called the Center for Ethics and Social Justice instead
of the Center for Economic and Social Justice . . . but it was noted that the
Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Culture had an article on the
previous page, so someone might have had ethics instead of economics on his
mind . . . not that ethics can be separated from economics (unless you’re
Keynes). . . .
• 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.
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| "Smile . . . or I will. . . ." |
• 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 44 different countries and 45 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, Australia,
Canada, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order
were “News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 33,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” “A Look at the Future, II: Labor Productivity?” “Distributism,
Socialism, and Syndicalism,” and “Is the United States the Enemy of Freedom and
Democracy?”
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#