With the summer about half over, it
is encouraging that there are so many signs that people are starting to wake up
to the potential of the Just Third Way. There
are only a few news items this week, but they are of “high quality.” Of course, all of our news items are always
of “high quality,” but these add a bit of significance to people outside the
movement as well:
• CESJ Internship. Sasha M., a
student from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), has
completed her work for the CESJ Spring 2018 internship. Sasha, a political science major, chose as
her main project a comparison of the various Universal Basic Income schemes,
the position of the Austrian School of economics, and CESJ’s Just Third Way
Capital Homesteading proposal. During
the course of her internship, Sasha made a number of insightful comments
regarding the Canadian social welfare system and some of the flaws that result
from shifting the primary responsibility for individual welfare from the human
person to the State. The overall
conclusion was that while such things as making the State directly responsible
for every individual’s material, mental, and spiritual wellbeing may be
well-intentioned, it ends up as an egregious misuse of the specialized tool of
the State, and almost inevitably ends up instituting and maintaining the very
conditions it seeks to ameliorate.
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| Fulton J. Sheen |
• Fulton Sheen Surprises. A
while back CESJ published the Just Third Way Edition of Fulton J. Sheen’s “long
lost” classic from 1940, Freedom
Under God. A few — very few —
commentators tried to make the case that CESJ’s understanding of Sheen’s
position on, say, private property in capital is completely wrong, and that
Sheen (despite a large number of clear and unequivocal statements to the
contrary) was actually in favor of “democratic” or “religious” socialism, i.e., a variety of socialism allegedly
consistent with Catholic social teaching and the precepts of the natural law. It turns out that there is a large body of
evidence completely refuting this view, something we discovered completely by
chance while doing some research into the career of John Henry Cardinal
Newman. It turns out that Monsignor
Ronald Knox, who was one of Sheen’s teachers and who introduced him to G.K.
Chesterton (to such good effect that Sheen became known in some circles as “the
American Chesterton”) greatly admired the work of one William Hurrell Mallock,
of which Newman also approved. Mallock,
who wrote a book titled Property and
Progress in 1884 to refute the theories of the agrarian socialist Henry
George as presented in George’s popular book, Progress and Poverty (1879), also wrote a book refuting positivism,
“the religion of humanity” (which is consistent with the subject of Sheen’s
first two books and his doctoral thesis), which Mallock titled, Is Life Worth Living? (1881). Fulton
Sheen was sufficiently impressed with Mallock’s work that in 1954 he wrote his
own book on the same theme, Life Is Worth
Living, and also used it for his television show that ran from 1952 to
1957. George Bernard Shaw loathed
Mallock, insisting that Mallock was stupid for not being a socialist and for
daring to say things about socialism that the socialists could not refute, even
writing a book about it in 1909, Socialism
and Superior Brains: A Reply to Mr. Mallock. From a Just Third Way point of view, Mallock’s
economics are grossly inadequate, but since the socialists were operating
within the same general framework, it evidently did the trick.
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| "Look what smiling did for me!" |
• 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 31 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, France, Canada,
Peru, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were, “A
New, Anti-Human Role for the State,” “Charles
Kingsley and John Henry Newman, I,” “News
from the Network, Vol. 11, No. 27,” “John
Henry Newman and Charles Kingsley,” and “Book
Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey.”
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#