The
New Year is off to a good start, as you can see from this week’s news items. They illustrate the importance of outreach —
and persistence (as well as persistence and persistence, the first, second, and
third keys to gaining acceptance of revolutionary new ideas):
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| Commonwealth of Kentucky, "the Bluegrass State" |
• Martin Smith has been making
great strides in the Commonwealth of Kentucky with a project that has the
potential not only to deal with an invasive species that is seriously harming
the ecosystem, but do so in a way that turns a profit instead of costing the
taxpayers. Best of all, the pilot program
will create approximately two hundred new owners of a start-up company that has
a ready market for its products.
• This blog has experienced explosive
growth in readership over the past week, on the order of 2,500% We attribute this to the postings on “The
Anti-Francis Effect” and “The American Chesterton” from last year, which
suddenly came to the notice of a number of interested groups. We hope, of course, that these new readers
and many others will not only continue to read the daily blog postings, but be
inspired to share them throughout their networks in the social media.
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| "The American Chesterton" |
• Speaking of “the American
Chesterton” — as Fulton Sheen was called — yesterday we received a rare copy of
Sheen’s 1943 book, Philosophies at War. We’ve only had a chance to read a quarter of
it, but it looks very good, and supports the Just Third Way (as expected). Of course, the book has the same general
theme as everything else Sheen wrote, i.e.,
only a return to a sound philosophy that puts God at the center instead of
Collective Man, something that speaks to people of all faiths, has the
potential to save the world from moral relativism and totalitarianism. This is found in Freedom
Under God as well, especially in the Just Third Way Edition.
• Speaking of Sheen, completely by
chance we discovered where he got the title of his famous television show, Life Is Worth Living, that ran from 1952
to 1957. Sheen was a student of Msgr.
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957), the noted English convert, mystery
novelist, and friend of G.K. Chesterton.
Msgr. Knox was a fan of the work of the Anglican apologist and economist
William Hurrell Mallock (1849-1923), author of a book titled, Is Life Worth Living? (1880). Mallock answered “yes” and then gave his
reasons. Sheen simply assumed the answer
was “yes” and told you why in each episode.
• Mallock’s most famous work was a
novel, The New Republic (1877), in
which he skewered the moral relativism and confusion of his day. Unfortunately, Mallock fictionalized actual
people and their opinions and attitudes, and few readers today recognize any of
the models. Since the entire novel is a
series of conversations with virtually no action, it makes for boring reading,
and is incomprehensible without extensive annotation. Knox, who was familiar with all of the
originals and personally acquainted with some of them thought the novel one of
the best ever written, rereading it many times, and spending a great deal of
time shortly before his death meditating on it.
• CESJ’s latest book (makes a great
post-Christmas gift), 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.
• After much
trauma, we finally fixed the problem with Google Analytics, but lost five days
of data (horrors). Allowing for that, we
have had visitors from 49 different countries and 56 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, Canada, India, and Nigeria.
The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from
the Network, Vol. 10, No. 01,” “The Anti-Francis Effect, I: Leo & Francis,”
“The Anti-Francis Effect, II: Leo’s Vision,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private
Property,” and “A Dishonest Way to Argue, I: Apples and Oranges.”
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#
