Call of the…
Religion & Liberty Online

Call of the…

Garbling difficult (and sometimes easy) words is a common and often humorous occurrence among children, as any parent can attest. My daughter did so serendipitously the other day, pronouncing Acton’s film production as “The Call of the Entre-manure.” As chance would have it—and as those who have seen the film or its trailer know—one of the documentary’s stories is about a dairy farmer who turned his animals’ waste into a profitable business. I wondered if Brad Morgan might like to take up the moniker, to distinguish his particular form of entrepreneurship.

On a hunch (as a historian, I pay homage to the nostrum “nothing new under the sun”), I googled what I thought was my discovery of a brilliant new term. Turns out that an Omaha business not only is already using the idea—they sell “Entremanure” T-shirts!

And UrbanDictionary.com offers two definitions of the term (not appropriate for quotation here).

The UrbanDictionary usage is not what I had in mind with respect to Brad Morgan, by the way, who is as admirable an example of a real entrepreneur as one can find.

Kevin Schmiesing

Kevin Schmiesing, Ph.D., is a research fellow for the research department at the Acton Institute. He is a frequent writer on Catholic social thought and economics, is the author of American Catholic Intellectuals, 1895-1955 (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002) and is most recently the author of Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (Lexington Books, 2004). Dr. Schmiesing holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in history from Franciscan University ofSteubenville. Author of Within the Market Strife and American Catholic Intellectuals, 1895—1955 (2002), he serves as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Markets & Morality. He is also executive director of CatholicHistory.net.