Friday, January 17, 2014

News from the Network, Vol. 7, No. 03


Things seem to be gaining momentum in the Just Third Way.  Those who are open to new ideas are starting to investigate with more seriousness, while those who are not seem to be “circling the wagons,” so to speak, and repeating disproved claims in an effort to discredit anything they don’t understand.

Bad as things look for many people at this time, then, there is actually a great deal of hope.  As we note below, the door-opening strategy is starting to bear some fruit:

• We came across an interesting quote this past week.  It sounds as if it was written today, but it dates from more than a century ago, 1890, to be exact.  While the subject was public schools v. religious schools, the point was that it is just as wrong for the secularists to impose their morality on religious people and make them pay for it, as it is for religious people to force secularists to pay to have religion imposed on them: “Secularists and unbelievers will demand their rights.  I concede their rights.  I will not impose upon them my religion, which is Christianity.  But let them not impose upon me and my fellow-Christians their religion, which is secularism.  Secularism is a religion of its kind, and usually a very loud-spoken and intolerant religion.  Non-sectarianism is not secularism, and, when non-sectarianism is intended, the secularist sect must not claim for itself the field which it refuses to others.  I am taking my stand upon our common American citizenship.  The liberty that I claim, I grant.” — Archbishop John Ireland, “State Schools and Parish Schools,” Address before the National Education Association of the United States, 1890.

• If you can believe (some) news reports, signups for “Obamacare” are a little skewed with respect to age.  Apparently, they need at least as four times as many younger people as are signing up to make the system work.  The idea, after all, was to implement a pay-as-you-go system in which younger people would pay in more than they get out now to support the healthcare needs of older people.  Then, when those who are now young are old, there will be a large number of young people paying in more than they are getting out to pay for those who were overpaying when they were young.  This is how Social Security was supposed to work, too.

• A number of possibly important connections have been made this past week, from a well-placed clergyman, to an economist.  Relationships — if any — are still in the developmental stage, but this shows the importance and effectiveness of the “door-opening strategy” we’ve been emphasizing.  These contacts represent a small percentage of attempts, but if no attempts had been made, neither would any potential allies and supporters have surfaced.

• Significant breakthroughs continue to occur in researching the roots of what happened to the definitions of distributive justice and social justice.  More and more it appears that certain events in the 1880s and 1890s in the Catholic New York Archdiocese not only divided Catholics on the issues, but spread far beyond the Catholic Church to the whole of society throughout the world.  Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum, showed how to bring unity back to society, but has been used by people who misunderstand the basic concepts involved to made the divide even greater.  Bringing the true story to light might help bring things back together.

• The quarterly “Irish SIG Newsletter” is out today.  Some of the material has a Just Third Way orientation, and a couple of CESJ publications are featured prominently.  Astonishingly, readership of the newsletter had a significant jump today.  Naturally, we credit this to the inclusion of a Just Third Way orientation.  People are looking for something new, and clearly all we have to do is communicate the fact that the Just Third Way is genuinely different from accepted paradigms more effectively..

• The big news is still that Freedom Under God is available after nearly three-quarters of a century.  CESJ is now taking bulk/wholesale orders (please, no individual sales).  The per unit price for ten or more copies is $16.00 (20% discount).  Shipping is extra.  Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” stating how many copies you want and the street address (no P. O. Boxes) where you want them delivered.  We will get back to you with the total cost, how to pay, and estimated delivery time.  All payments must be made in advance, and orders are placed only after payment clears.  Individual copies are available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as by special order from many bookstores.

CESJ offers a 10% commission on the retail cover price on bulk sales of publications.  If you broker a deal with, for example, a school or civic organization that buys a publication in bulk (i.e., ten copies or more of a single title), you receive a commission once a transaction has been completed to the satisfaction of the customer.  Thus, if you get your club or school to purchase, say, ten cases of Freedom Under God (280 copies) or any other CESJ or UVM publication, the organization would pay CESJ $3,920.00 (280 copies x $20 per copy, less a 30% discount), plus shipping (the commission is calculated on the retail cost only, not the shipping).  You would receive $560.00.  Send an e-mail to “publications [at] cesj [dot] org” for copies of flyers of CESJ and UVM publications.  (CESJ project participants and UVM shareholders are not eligible for commissions.)

So Much Generosity, the collection of essays about the fiction of Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson by Michael D. Greaney, CESJ’s Director of Research.  The book is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and is also available on Kindle. Many of the essays incorporate elements of the Just Third Way.  The book is priced at $20.00, and there is a 20% discount on bulk orders (i.e., ten or more), which can be ordered by sending an e-mail to publications [at] cesj [dot] org.

• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 50 different countries and 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Canada. The most popular postings this past week were “Some Thoughts on Money, Part II,” “A Brief Course in Banking Theory, I: Banks of Deposit,” “What History Teaches Us About the Welfare State,” “A Guarantee of Nothing,” and “Aristotle on Private Property.”

Those are the happenings for this week, at least 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 anyway, so we’ll see it before it goes up.

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