The news this week
suggests that the Just Third Way is starting to make significant progress in
outreach — which means that, to sustain the effort, it needs to make more
progress. Obviously, when you’re
standing still, you’re not moving forward.
People in any movement need to remind themselves constantly that they
can’t rest on what they’ve done in the past, but have to keep doing things now
and in the future.
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| Everyone needs a door opened occasionally |
• The CESJ monthly
meeting was held this past Monday, May 22, 2017. The focus topic was surfacing “prime movers”
who can carry the message of the Just Third Way into the national and
international political arena. A number
of names were suggested as possible prime movers, but the real need at this
stage is to surface “door openers” who can get members of the CESJ core group
to prime movers.
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| His Eminence Gerhard Cardinal Müller |
• There have been
some substantial advances in introducing people at the Vatican to the Just
Third Way. Although no one from CESJ was
privileged to meet with His Eminence Gerhard Cardinal Müller during his recent
visit to Arlington, Virginia, we purchased his book, The
Cardinal Müller Report (2017), and — in between the purely religious
concepts in which CESJ has no official
interest — found a great deal of common ground with the Just Third Way,
especially the ideas of participative and social justice, with distributive
justice constituting the three principles of economic justice. There was what appeared to be an allusion to
the work of Mortimer J. Adler, co-author with Louis O. Kelso of The Capitalist Manifesto
(1958) and The New Capitalists
(1961), and certainly an affinity with Alder’s solid Aristotelian-Thomism; some
of His Eminence’s comments about Plato might be thought by some to verge on the
slightly pejorative, something he shares with Adler. A pleasant surprise was a clear and forceful
rejection of the shift from the Intellect to the Will as the basis of the
natural law that infects modern thought.
We also enjoyed the brief reference to G.K. Chesterton (although
Chestertonians with Luddite leanings might not!) and the mention of the Don
Camillo stories by Giovanni Guareschi.
• CESJ has received
a number of enquiries about internships, and we expect to be following up on
them in the near future.
• Joyce Hart, the
award winning film maker responsible for The Sisters of Selma documentary, is
still pursuing a film on the expanded ownership paradigm. She has made significant contacts throughout
the expanded ownership community, and is thinking of broadening the subject to
include a more comprehensive treatment of what CESJ calls the Just Third Way.
• 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 28 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, Kenya, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Nigeria. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Welding Irony, II: The Purpose of Production,” “The Purpose
of Production” (we’re not repeating ourselves, those are two different
postings), “Welding Irony, III: A Few Bugs in the System,” and “News from the
Network, Vol. 10, No. 20.”
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#