Although the delay in announcing the official winner of the U.S. presidential race is annoying (to say the least), what is truly baffling is the behavior of the stock market, which has been soaring to new heights despite the bizarre economic and political situation. In any event, most things seem on hold until the winner is settled and a vaccine released, but here goes:
• Justice University. A template for “Justice University Partnerships” is being developed to try and help fill the need in Academia and elsewhere for a sound, principled, Aristotelian-Thomist approach to what is somewhat misleadingly called a “liberal arts education.” It should probably be called a “basic education,” as the principles of justice and the other virtues are universally applicable, even in the hard sciences, especially when the hard sciences are put to practical use. After all, “two plus two equals four” may be “pure math,” but “two slaves plus two slaves” equals four times the injustice. Nor should “Justice University” be construed as limited to higher education or even to Academia for “JU Partnerships.” Its programs will be useful at any level of education and for virtually all types of organizations and institutions, such as civic organizations, churches, businesses, and even families. Every individual and institution benefits when people learn how to become more fully human, which is the goal of Justice University.
• Justice University Research Fellowships. An important feature of a Justice University program might be “Justice University Fellowships.” A “JU Fellow” should be a full-time employee or the equivalent of a partnering institution who will carry on research in the Just Third Way and help advance the goal of a more justly structured social order.
• Economic Personalism. The files were submitted to the printer and have been accepted. It’s possible copies will be available in one or two weeks, but that depends on the printer’s schedule.
• Another Non-Just Third Way Book. . . but one that has a Just Third Way foreword! Recently, CESJ’s Director of Research was
asked to contribute a foreword to “Catholic Classic,” They Lived the Faith,
by Thomas P. Neill, originally published in 1951. The book gives thirteen biographical sketches
about nineteenth century Catholic lay men and women who carried on the struggle
against socialism and modernism.
Interestingly, much of what they did was in conformity with the act of
social justice as analyzed by CESJ co-founder Father William Ferree. Of course, writing in 1951 the author was not
aware of Louis Kelso’s work that wouldn’t be published until 1958 in The
Capitalist Manifesto with Mortimer Adler, so details that an economic
personalist would find most interesting might have been omitted. A woman named Pauline Jaricot, for example, might
have included worker ownership in her failed industrial experiment (the failure
was due to her trusting two swindlers, not to any flaw in the plan), while
comte Albert de Mun seems to have proposed something approximating what we
would call “Ownership Unions” although calling them guilds.
• Sensus Fidelium Videos, Update. The complete series of sixteen videos of the series we’ve done with the “Sensus Fidelium” YouTube channel is now available. For “interfaith” presentations to a Catholic audience they are proving to be popular, with more than 60,000 views to date. They aren’t really “Just Third Way videos,” but they do incorporate a Just Third Way perspective. You can access the playlist for the entire series by clicking on the link: “Socialism, Modernism, and the New Age.” The point of the videos is to explain how socialism and socialist assumptions got such a stranglehold on the understanding of the role of the State and thus the interpretation of Catholic social teaching, and even the way non-Catholics and even non-Christians understand the roles of Church, State, and Family, and the human person’s place in society.
• 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 40 different countries and 43 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 Philippines, and Brazil. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “JTW Podcast, Socialism, Part 14, What Happened to Vatican II?” “A Framework for a Solution,” “A (Very) Short Treatise on Money and Banking,” “‘A Small Error in the Beginning’,” 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.” Due to imprudent language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled comments.
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