Friday, September 23, 2016

News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 36


A number of important irons are in the fire as CESJ approaches the end of its fiscal year (September 30).  A lot of time is taken up with that, of course, but things are also moving forward:
• CESJ had its monthly executive committee meeting this past Monday.  Participants called in from all over the United States, and one from Guatemala.  The phone-in from India missed the meeting because of a time miscalculation.
It doesn't have to be on a hill, either.
• The CESJ core group had an in-depth conversation earlier this week with an entrepreneur who has an interesting idea about how to handle the refugee crisis . . . that doesn’t involve building walls or shipping them back where they came from.  Instead, the idea is to build new communities of 10-12,000 people each, using new energy technologies and advanced corporate finance to supply a productive economy that has a net contribution to the economy instead of a net drain.  Citizen ownership and participation would be key to the concept.
Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D.
• CESJ’s president, Norman Kurland, had a long talk with a researcher at Dayton University who is interested in learning more about CESJ and why its co-founder, Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., considered CESJ so important.  Father Ferree believed that virtually everyone had missed the “great message” of Pope Pius XI’s completed social doctrine: the act of social justice, and its potential for turning around our entire society — in a just way for the benefit of all.  Combined with the principles of economic justice discerned by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, there is the possibility of building a more just and humane future for everybody, not just a capitalist or socialist élite and their chosen few.  As Father Ferree said when he addressed the Lay Commission on the Economy in 1984, “our ‘Center for Economic and Social Justice’ wants to reorient your entire dialogue from recriminations and defenses for the injustices we have all inherited, to the justice we can all pursue in this truly historic opportunity.  Father Ferree’s pamphlet, Introduction to Social Justice, can be downloaded free from the CESJ website.
No, the other John Sullivan. . .
• An article on CESJ appeared in yesterday’s issue of The Irish Rover, an independent student publication at the University of Notre Dame.  Written by a past editor, John Sullivan, “The Third Way: CESJ and Binary Economics,” gives a pretty good thumbnail sketch of the thought of Louis Kelso, and suggests it merits examination as a way in which people in the future can meet their own needs through their own efforts — not forgetting the need to take care of people now, of course.  There was one small error in the article, CESJ was called the Center for Ethics and Social Justice instead of the Center for Economic and Social Justice . . . but it was noted that the Associate Director of the Center for Ethics and Culture had an article on the previous page, so someone might have had ethics instead of economics on his mind . . . not that ethics can be separated from economics (unless you’re Keynes). . . .
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores.  The book can also be ordered in bulk, which we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount.  A full case is twenty-six copies, and non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover price on wholesale lots ($416/case).  Shipping is extra.  Send enquiries to publications@cesj.org.  An additional discount may be available for institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as retailers.
"Smile . . . or I will. . . ."
• Here’s the usual announcement about the Amazon Smile program, albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing it.  To participate in the Amazon Smile program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/.  Next, sign in to your 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.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors from 44 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, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and India. The most popular postings this past week in descending order were “News from the Network, Vol. 9, No. 33,” “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “A Look at the Future, II: Labor Productivity?” “Distributism, Socialism, and Syndicalism,” and “Is the United States the Enemy of Freedom and Democracy?”
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#