As summer gets
underway next week, people in the Just Third Way are taking the opportunity to
get various projects moving again. In
that, we’re doing a bit better than a lot of governments around the world who
seem baffled about what to do — largely because they don’t yet know about the
Just Third Way. But we’re doing what we
can —
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| "Is this where I apply for a CESJ Internship?" |
• CESJ is
interviewing a candidate from Canada for a Fellowship today. In addition, we have inquiries from a
Fellowship candidate from Columbia and another from an Internship candidate
California; we really seem to be hitting the “High Cs” lately, and all very
impressive credentials, something with which CESJ has been extraordinarily
fortunate. CESJ has had interns and
fellows from Africa, Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and now might add
South America. We don’t know about
surfacing an Antarctican, though, to be able to cover all the continents. If you are interested in a CESJ Fellowship or
Internship, or in becoming a volunteer (you can do it long distance over the internet,
depending on your projects, especially if you’re “in” to social media),
consider applying. No pay, but the
intellectual, moral, and social rewards are immense, and if you’re religious,
we might even say “out of this world” . . . .
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| "I am not a socialist." |
• Recently we finished
reading a book by Alexis de Tocqueville that was not Democracy in America. It was
the posthumous The Recollections of
Alexis de Tocqueville, relating his experiences during and immediately
after the Revolution of 1848. Perhaps
not surprisingly, although de Tocqueville displayed his dislike of socialism
and his irritation with socialists on almost every page, the editor of the
edition we obtained, an academic considered an authority on de Tocqueville,
insisted in his foreword that the author of Democracy
in America was really a socialist at heart and looked forward to the
ultimate establishment and maintenance of socialism.
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| The prophet of Christian socialism. |
• Speaking of
socialism, this week we came across what may be the earliest use of the term
“new things” in Catholic social teaching.
We found it in a very brief encyclical by a pope most people never heard
of, Singulari Nos, Gregory XVI’s 1834
letter “On the Errors of Lamennais.” Who
was de Lamennais? A Catholic priest
considered by some to be the forerunner of liberal or social Catholicism. He advocated a “democratic theocracy” and
developed a theory that only the collective has reason and therefore
rights. De Lamennais’s “theory of
certitude” is one of the founding principles of Christian socialism, or (as he and others called it) "Neo-Catholicism." After de Lamennais had been instructed in an
earlier encyclical, Mirari Vos in
1832, that his theory was not consistent with natural law, and that he
shouldn’t try to defend the Catholic Church by twisting or inventing doctrines,
he left the Church, started his own religion, "the Religion of Humanity" (we don't know whether Auguste Comte stole from de Lamennais, or de Lamennais stole from Comte. . . .), and published
a pamphlet, Les Paroles d'un Croyant ("The Words of a Believer"), attacking the pope. Gregory
XVI described de Lamennais’s ideas as “new things” (and the pamphlet as "small in size but great in wickedness") because Pierre Laroux had just
invented the term “socialism” (socialisme). The pope hadn’t gotten word of the new word,
and it wouldn’t come to mean “democratic religion” (démocratie religieuse) for a few more years, anyway. In a sense, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum was a follow up to Gregory
XVI’s Singulari Nos.
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| The Just Third Way spans the globe. |
• Great efforts are
currently being made to introduce the concepts of the Just Third Way to leaders
throughout the world. Materials have
been sent to leaders (and possibly some of them were even read!) in Italy,
France, Belgium, Guinea, Burundi, Germany, Great Britain, the Republic of
Ireland, and a number of other places abroad, as well as a number of U.S.
states and commonwealths (unlike Canada, where the three territories and ten provinces
are a bit different, U.S. states and commonwealths are legally the same). The idea is to reach out to leaders and open
doors for a meeting at high levels, meaning a level high enough to do something
other than shake hands and smile for the camera.
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| "I'm gonna eat worms 'cause you didn't join Smile." |
• 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 32 different countries and 41 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the
United States, South Africa, Canada, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The Peculiar Peculium,”
“The Redemption of the Non-Owning Workers,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10,
No. 23,” “Child or Slave?” and “How to Redeem the Non-Owning Worker.”
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#