Never has the phrase “no news is good news” been more true, as we’d rather have no news at all than our first item:
• John Moorehouse, RIP. As regular readers of this blog are aware, a good friend and supporter of the Just Third Way, John Moorehouse, Acquisitions Editor for TAN Books (an imprint of Saint Benedict Press), died suddenly this past Saturday. We shared some thoughts in our posting of Wednesday, December 9 (“‘Farewell to a Father’”). The tribute from Inside the Vatican magazine can be found here, while the Sensus Fidelium video “Tribute to John Moorehouse” with Charles Coloumbe should definitely be viewed. Be sure to visit the GoFundMe campaign page for John’s family and make a contribution.
• Economic Personalism. If you purchase a copy of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, be sure you post a review after you’ve read it. It is now available on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble at the cover price of $10 per copy. If you’d like to “try before you buy” (or just don’t have room on your shelves for another book), download the free copy in .pdf available from the CESJ website. If you’d like to order in bulk (i.e., ten or more copies) at the wholesale price, send an email to publications@cesj.org for details. CESJ members get a $2 rebate per copy on submission of proof of purchase. Wholesale case lots of 52 copies are available at $350, plus shipping (whole case lots ONLY). Prices are in U.S. dollars.
Oh, boy. More of the same, only more so.
• The Great Reset. With all the talk about the “Great Reset,” we can’t really say that we see any difference between the Great Reset, what Hilaire Belloc wrote about in The Servile State (1912), and the general trend of the world economy since the Great Depression and the Keynesian New Deal. Where economic personalism focuses on the dignity and sovereignty of the actual, individual human person, the Servile State and the Great Reset treat most people in collectivist/elitist ways, with little or no recognition of their wants and needs as human persons, particularly the need to empower every child, woman, and man with capital ownership so they are able to exercise their rights and become virtuous.
• Sensus Fidelium Videos, Update. CESJ has begun a new series of videos for Sensus Fidelium, this time contrasting economic personalism and the Great Reset. Plans are to begin filming the series next week, but the intro video, a “review/interview” of Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, is already up on YouTube and available for viewing. As for the previous series of sixteen videos on socialism, it’s still available, along with some book reviews and other selected topics. For “interfaith” presentations to a Catholic audience they’ve proved to be popular, with nearly 70,000 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 39 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, India, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Farewell to a Father,” “Book Review: A Field Guide for the Hero’s Journey,” “JTW PodCast: Concerns With Fratelli Tutti,” “News from the Network, Vol. 13, No. 49,” and “The Expanded Ownership Revolution.”
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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