Some new
initiatives, the near-completion of others, and restarting still others have
marked this week. As the end of the year
approaches, this bodes well for continued success in the coming year:
• CESJ Internship Program. CESJ was honored this week by
Professor Hawkins of the Brigham Young University Washington Seminar, making a
site visit. Dr. Hawkins made a number of
useful and insightful comments relevant to the Just Third Way during the lunch.
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| Good . . . but could be better and more universal. |
• Red Star Over Bethlehem. We’ve
been reviewing the overall plan for the book, and have (almost decided that it
is too small in scope; it's not a religious thing (although you can't discuss social justice without mentioning religion . . . a lot). The book is
certainly long enough, as it has to be to cover the subject of what happened to
make the concept of social justice go so far off course. It does not, however,
address in any depth how economic justice got off course, nor how the Just
Third Way brings them together in a consistent (and coherent) fashion, and might make people think it's just a religious issue (it's not). We have almost decided to retitle the book
and make it part of a trilogy . . . assuming, of course, that the reception of
the first volume warrants it. We have
been assured by one individual with high-level contacts at the Vatican that the
book is “brilliant,” and we’d like to leverage that into a complete, if
necessarily somewhat limited, presentation divided into three parts, with an
overall title, but then a separate title for each volume, e.g., similar to what John Julius Norwich did for his three-volume
narrative history of Byzantium, viz., Byzantium:
The Early Centuries, Byzantium: The
Apogee, and Byzantium: The Decline
and Fall.
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| Emperor/Basileus Heraclius, AD 610-642, Homestead sponsor |
• The First Homesteader. At
the suggestion of an editor of a major Catholic publisher, we are looking into
a biography of the life and times of Heraclius, the last emperor/first basileus
of Byzantium — who sponsored a program to restore the greatness of Byzantium by
means of a program similar to the Homestead Act that encouraged widespread
ownership of landed capital . . . and succeeded. One of the reasons Heraclius is considered so
great is that he followed one of the worst emperors Byzantium — or anywhere
else — ever had: Phocas. As described by
John Julius Norwich, “The appearance of the Emperor Phocas was distinctly
unprepossessing. Under a tangle of red
hair, his thick, beetling eyebrows met across his nose; the rest of his face
was deformed by a huge, angry scar that turned crimson when he was aroused,
giving it a still more hideous aspect.
He was not, however, as pleasant as he looked.” (John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 88.)
• Citizens Land Cooperative. The
CESJ core group will be having a discussion next week with some individuals
interested in exploring the possibility of applying the “Citizens
Land Cooperative” (also called “the Citizens Land Bank”) concept in Ukraine.
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| "You contributed to CESJ? Excellent. . . ." |
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon 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.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 27 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, Switzerland,
India, Canada, and South Africa. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “A Question of
Human Dignity,” “Halloween Horror Special: Marxism,” “The Significance of the
Frontier,” “News from the Network, Vol. 10, No. 43,” and “The Problem (And
Solution) of Social Justice.”
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#