This article has been adapted from a reflection by Reverend Ebony Grisom at a Faith for Just Lending convening in January. Faith for Just Lending is a national coalition of faith-based institutions working to end predatory payday lending. Learn more about how predatory payday lending harms families and communities here. I’ve been reading Nehemiah for the past […]
Sermon – The Reign of God
So, when I read the lessons and found out that I was preaching about the end times, my first thought was to deliver a good old-fashioned fire and brimstone sermon. But I ran into three problems. First, I had to use google just to figure out what brimstone was. (It’s sulfer, so basically volcanic ash). […]
Poverty Used To Be Considered A Social Good
Sometimes it feels like poverty advocates are making the same arguments year after year and getting nowhere. The good news is, looking over a longer time frame we can actually see that a lot of progress has been made. The past two centuries have seen a remarkable change in the role of governments in combating […]
Poverty News Round Up
With the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other: 1. Low-income students now make up a majority of school-children in the South and West: “But by 2011, almost half of the nation’s 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion […]
Economics for Advocates: Public Goods
Economists define public goods has having two characteristics Non-rivalrous in consumption Non-excludable Being non-rivalrous means that more than one person can enjoy the good at the same time. For example, my enjoyment of a park is (under usual circumstances) not lessened by your enjoyment of the same park. By contrast, a rivalrous good might be […]
How do we know the safety net isn’t lulling people into dependency?
There are a lot of ways we could ask about the motivational effects of the safety net. We could do complicated analysis of the rate at which benefits phase out as income increases, and then compare the level of benefits from the safety net to those of holding a minimum wage job. But the simplest […]
Economics for Advocates: Introduction
Salutations! I am starting a new series on the blog called “Economics for Advocates,” and focusing on explaining economic concepts that might be useful to you in your advocacy work. You may have questions. Specifically you may be wondering why you would even want to think like an economist. (if you have other questions, please […]
Economic Law in the Hebrew Scriptures, A Brief Introduction
Other than the Bible’s many genealogies, the laws laid out in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers may be the most overlooked part of the Bible. This is unfortunate, because the laws give us our first glimpse of the Kingdom of God. By bringing the Hebrew people out of Egypt God is revealed as a God who […]
Poverty and the Good Shepherd
I’ve been reading a little bit about welfare reform and implementation. One image that really struck me from interviews was that both case managers and clients described the new welfare system as being like herding cattle. Here’s the brief excerpt from Disciplining the Poor: Indeed, case managers and clients often converge in striking ways as […]
Poverty and the 2012 Election: Reflection and Prayer by Rev. Michael Livingston
Since the recession began in 2007 only two congressional districts in the entire nation that have had a statistically significant decrease in poverty. One hundred forty-five have stayed the same and 388 have seen a significant increase in people living in poverty. Forty-nine million Americans are living in poverty. That’s the context in which our […]
