This has been a
busy week for the Just Third Way. A
number of glitches popped up but were dealt with, but more important, we have
made some significant contacts and engaged in some very effective
outreach. It shows what can be done with
a modicum of effort if members of the network take the time to reach out to
those in their own networks:
 |
| Senator Russell Long (left), Norman Kurland (right). |
• Meeting with Deal Hudson. On
Wednesday of this week the CESJ core group met with Dr. Deal Hudson, who
interviewed CESJ’s Director of Research about his new book from TAN Books, Ten
Battles Every Catholic Should Know. The
lunch meeting went very well, with Dr. Hudson expressing interest in the Just
Third Way. Of particular note was Dr.
Hudson’s work with Mortimer J. Adler, the “Great Books” philosopher, at the
Aspen Institute. Adler, of course, was
co-author with Louis O. Kelso of The Capitalist Manifesto (1958) and The New Capitalists (1961).
Dr. Hudson seemed particularly interested in CESJ’s proposals for
monetary reform, although in a brief meeting it was impossible to do any more
than scratch the surface. To get deeper
into these matters, Dr. Hudson has proposed a series of interviews with Norman
Kurland on his radio show, “Church and Culture” on
the Ave Maria Radio Network, an affiliate of EWTN.
• CESJ Podcast. Due to some
miscommunication, the CESJ podcast, “The Just Third Way Hour,” was down for a
couple of days this week. Host Dave
Hamill has been working to get the system up and running again on a new service
provider, which should improve service as well as get the podcast back on line. A number of them are up already on the new
site and can be accessed here. On the plus side, if you're listening to them as Justice University classrooms, don't worry. Dave doesn't take attendance. Even he doesn't have to be there. . . .
• Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know. We will know more in a couple of weeks when
the semi-annual sales reports come out, but it appears that Ten Battles Every Catholic Should Know
has been doing pretty well for a first-book-from-a-major-publisher from CESJ’s
Director of Research. It should do even
better when the new sales flyers are ready and can be sent out in a mass (e)
mailing. The book has proven to be very
popular with readers, and a number are already asking about more books.
• Chesterton and the Just Third Way. This past week we received a telephone call
from a law professor in New York who has a third year student doing a research
paper on the relationship between the distributist thought of G.K. Chesterton
and Hilaire Belloc, Catholic social teaching, and CESJ’s Just Third Way. We were fortunately able to give the student
(and the professor) a good summary of how they all relate, expanding on much of
what is in the fairly recent article in Homiletic
and Pastoral Review, “Pope
Francis and the Just Third Way.”
• 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 28 different
countries and 44 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, the Philippines, and India.
The most popular postings this past week in descending order were, “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “Philosophies at War, IX: The Apostle of Common
Sense,” “Needed: A New Frontier,” Lord of the World, XI: A Turning Point for
Humanity,” and “The Purpose of Production.”
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#