The year is still
pretty young, but things are starting to happen. CESJ had its quarterly board meeting this
past week, and people from across the country and around the globe had a number
of interesting things to report, some of which are covered below:
• CESJ Quarterly Board Meeting and Community Forum. The CESJ quarterly board meeting and
Community Forum was held Monday, January 22, 2018, in Arlington, Virginia. The principal item discussed was setting the
date for the CESJ annual celebration and membership meeting in light of a
possible conflict with another important event in Detroit, Michigan.
• Wayne County Project. The
potential conflict with the CESJ annual celebration is the possibility of something
happening in Wayne County, Michigan. A
project there could not only revive the area but also get a toehold at the
Federal Reserve and for ownership unions.
Chris D.. a local politician, has been making a lot of contacts, all the
way up to the mayor and a number of state politicians. Chris has said he likes the idea of the CLB
and the HEC.
• CESJ/GJM Newsletter. Dan
Parker has been developing an outline and deciding what kind of information
would go in to a newsletter, with a target launch date of March of this year. Dan bought a program for mailouts and thinks
he should be able to convert data from Mailchimp, which is what we’re using
now. He thinks the newsletter should be
global in scope, and (of course) have the CESJ logo
• Just Third Way Podcast. We need to set up a meeting with Dave
Hamill, who is hosting the podcast, and set up future recording sessions. Dan Parker would be a good interview subject,
and maybe some recordings on how crypto currencies can help bring about the Just Third Way.
• Hartford,
Connecticut. Russell Williams
reported that he is looking at a lot of projects in Hartford. He has been sounding out local colleges and
universities as potential partners in CESJ and Justice University projects. The
insurance community might start embrace what we’re trying to do. Capital credit insurance and reinsurance would
go a long way toward making this happen.
• Official Book Release. Monday,
January 15, 2018, was the official release date of Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know. Although only a Just Third Way book in the
larger sense of the term, the publisher has indicated interest in doing a more
JTW-themed book should this one be a success.
Fortunately, the book is already doing well, and one of the editors has
already expressed interest in a follow-up project with a more integrated Just
Third Way theme. Al Smith in Canada
reported that he sold three copies recently at a conference. TAN Books,
the publisher, may soon be able to start a publicity campaign.
• Red Star Over Bethlehem. The
new introduction to the book is still in the final stages of editing, and we
expect to have a first draft of the foreword within the next couple of weeks written
by a professor of philosophy at a Catholic college. We are currently also following up with an
expert in natural law to ensure that our take on that is consistent with sound
Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy. Some
“tweaks” are being made to the text in light of some facts that have come to
light, but nothing substantive.
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| "Smile. Or else." |
• 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 34 different
countries and 52 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada, the Caribbean Netherlands, and Peru. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were, “Social Justice and Science Fiction,” “Guilty Until
Proven Innocent,” “The Problem of Wealth, III: The Fabian Failure,” “Turning
the Other Cheek,” and “Panic on the Street.”
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#