This
has been another seemingly slow news week in which a great deal has been accomplished. Contrary to the usual case with many
organizations, CESJ actually gets things done in meetings, and comes up with
some good ideas:
• On Wednesday the CESJ core group
met with Dr. Samuel Otterstrom of Brigham Young University, currently with
BYU’s Washington Seminar. In the discussion
during and after lunch, Norman Kurland presented Dr. Otterstrom with a broad
overview of the Just Third Way. In
consequence, Norm was asked to be a featured speaker at one of the Friday
sessions that end each week.
• CESJ has agreed with a friend in
Australia to make a concerted effort to exploit personal contacts to arrange
additional meetings for Norman Kurland and the CESJ core group. A special focus, apart from the Vatican
itself, is Catholic Academia. As there
are a number of Catholic colleges and universities in the DC metro area or
close by, the Arlington Diocese is a good place to start.
• CESJ is exploring
the possibility of a conference on a pro-life economic agenda, along the lines
suggested by Supporting
Life, and based on the Universal
Declaration of the Sovereignty of the Human Person Under God. Ideally, this would lead to a “bipartisan”
conference bringing together people on both sides of the issue, with everyone
seeing the advantages of a life-affirming economic and financial system over
those of today, a rally at the Federal Reserve, and the passage of a Capital
Homestead Act for the United States to follow up on the success of Abraham
Lincoln’s 1862 Homestead Act, but with a form of capital that is not limited.
• 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 48 different countries and 46 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 New Zealand. The most popular postings this past week in descending order
were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Popes are
the Craziest People,” A Brief Discourse on Social Credit, I: What IS ‘Social
Credit’?” and “Pity the Distributist.”
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#