Justice University

This week’s video podcast is a slight change of pace: Steve Cunningham interviews Norman Kurland and they discuss the Just Third Way:

This week’s video podcast is the fourth and final installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   Again, this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.   Today we look at what we’d like to say to Pope Francis if we happen to have a meeting with him any time soon:

This week’s video podcast is the third installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   While this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , it is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.   Today we look at why who pays for something has the right to control it.

This week’s video podcast is the second installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   Again, this is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.

For the video podcast this week, we have the first installment of a four-part series on “Economic Personalism versus The Great Reset”.   This is loosely related to the book, Economic Personalism , but is more in the nature of a somewhat informal conversation about applying the principles of economic personalism to a specific situation.

On today’s video podcast, we bring you a book review/interview on CESJ’s latest publication, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Citizen.   The book just came out litter over a month aga, but is already beginning to make a splash:

Yes, this is about the Just Third Way, too.   Remember the podcast on Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World ?   A few years later, Benson was annoyed that people insisted on taking his satire as “prophecy” that he decided to write The Dawn of All , a “counterblast” (his word), in which everything in Lord of the World was flipped on its head.

No, really, this is about the Just Third Way.   Back in the early twentieth century, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson published a satirical novel (that many people have mistaken for some kind of prophecy), lambasting the “new things” of socialism, modernism, and the New Age from a “Catholic” point of view.   Despite the overtly religious nature of the novel, however, it delivers a universal message about the dangers of shifting away from the human person to the abstraction of “humanity”:

One of the things that we discovered early on in the Global Justice Movement is that there are a lot of definitions of “social justice” floating around.   A frequent problem, then, is that we often get into arguments with people who insist that social justice means one thing, when we clearly mean something completely different. . . .

Oh, no!   Not another Catholic video podcast!   You’re right, it’s not . . . at least, not very much.   You’ll notice the clever way we inserted a discussion of how Catholic social teaching and the economic justice principles of Louis Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler come together in the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism. . . . Besides, we wrote the foreword and it's almost wholly Just Third Way:

Yet again it looks as if we’re not only getting explicitly religious here, but we’re picking on Pope Francis.   Neither assumption would be correct, however.   The fact is that Pope Francis’s recent encyclical contained some statements regarding private property that appear to be at variance with the natural law, and we want to make certain His Holiness gets a chance to explain them.   Then we can pick on him. . . .

Okay, we know exactly what you’re thinking.   What is this Catholic monarchic conspiracy video doing on the Just Third Way blog?   Well . . . everything, actually.   You see, it turns out that what Pope Pius XI called “the Reign of Christ the King didn’t really have anything to do with establishing monarchy, and is a natural law concept, not really religious, per se.   It seems that Pius XI was countering the socialist idea of heaven here on earth with a somewhat different notion. . . .

Yes, we realize that it’s so much easier to tell others what they’re doing wrong and demand that they do it right, but face it.   Do you think people really want to do things wrong?   Maybe it’s just that nobody bothered to tell them there’s a right way . . . our Just Third Way. . . .

Back in 1984, two representatives of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) testified before the Lay Commission on the Economy that attempted to advise the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the draft of their pastoral on the economy.   Remarkably, not one word of what was said made its way into the final document. . . .

  From the Just Third Way perspective (i.e., natural law in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition), as a religious event, the Second Vatican Council is of no relevance.   As an application of natural law principles to counter the “new things” of socialism, modernism, and esotericism, however, it is of great importance . . . especially given the way (in our opinion) it was diverted and used to advance the very things it was intended to counter.

As a follow-up to the previous video podcast on “the Act of Social Justice,” this week we bring you “Economic Justice for All.”   Note that although this podcast has the same title as the U.S. Bishops’ pastoral on the economy, it takes a slightly different — as well as more effective and respectful of human dignity — direction.

Although in everyday usage social justice is a rather vague term (and a compliment or pejorative, depending on who is speaking), there is actually a well-developed body of thought on social justice within the framework of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas:

The problem with trying to get a handle on solidarism these days is that few people who consider themselves solidarists are aware of the history of solidarism.   Without that basic knowledge of how solidarist thought developed, however, it is often impossible to discern “true” solidarism as (re)developed by Heinrich Pesch, from the other schools and distortions:

Perhaps not surprisingly, today’s video on G.K. Chesterton has proved to be one of our most popular.   Why?   Perhaps it has to do with our rather heterodox position on Chesterton and his life’s work.   We think, for example, that he was not a socialist or a capitalist, but an advocate in somewhat limited form of what we today call the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism.   It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue as trippingly as the same old things, but judge for yourself:

Today we have the second part of a talk by Dr. Norman Kurland, president of the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice, on the "Economic Democracy Act" (formerly the "Capital Homestead Act").  The presentation is a good summary of how to apply the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism, which is also the subject of an upcoming book from Justice University Press: