This
week has been filled with a number of activities, few of which have anything to
do with the Just Third Way, at least directly.
There have been a few items of note, however:
• The CESJ/Justice University team
returned from Louisville late Tuesday.
The event itself went very well, with approximately 130 attendees, a record for a JU event. The group also visited the fourth largest
magazine printing company in the United States, Publishers Press. The CEO expressed a great deal of interest in
“Justice-Based Management,” the Just Third Way approach to establishing and
maintaining economic justice in the workplace.
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| R.H. Tawney, Fabian Socialist |
• We received one
of two biographies of the noted Fabian socialist Richard Henry Tawney
(1880-1962) we’ve ordered. This one is
by Ross Terrill, R.H. Tawney and his times: Socialism as fellowship
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973). In addition to socialism, Tawney, who was on
the Executive of the Fabian Society from 1920 to 1933, advocated the
transformation of organized religion from God-centered to a focus on Collective
Man, a development Fulton Sheen (1895-1979) addressed in God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925) and Religion Without God (1928). Tawney’s “New Age” ideas combining
“modernism” and socialism developed from the “New Christian” movement of the
early nineteenth century, which integrated selected Christian elements into
socialism and Occult (“spiritualist” or “magnetic”) thought. This eventually led to (among other esoteric
schools of thought) theosophy, ariosophy (the basis of much Nazi ideology), and
the “solidarism” of David Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) that posited “God” as a
“divinized society” (not to be confused with the solidarism of Fr. Heinrich
Pesch, S.J., 1854-1926, although some modern solidarists have done exactly
that) and the proposals of agrarian socialist Henry George (1839-1897) — who
was involved in the Occult and the New Christian movement — that were the basis
for Fabian socialism. Tawney’s
best-known work, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism (1926) is noteworthy for its attacks on the institutional
Catholic Church (especially the papacy), and its ridicule of G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953).
Paradoxically, Tawney and another Fabian socialist, E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977),
a protégé of John Maynard Keynes, are
held in high regard by many of today’s “Chestertonians” and “distributists.” It is interesting to note that the emblem of
the Fabian Society is the wolf in sheep’s clothing, indicative of their policy
of taking over institutions through infiltration and subversion.
• 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.
• We have had
visitors from 30 different countries and 38 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, Australia, the United Kingdom,” Ecuador, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “1. Walter Russell Mead’s Awful Idea,” “3. Walter Russell
Mead’s Awful Idea,” “2. Walter Russell Mead’s Awful Idea,” and “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 14.”
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#