The credit shortage that has been the focus of many stories in the secular press is also effecting the “micro-finance” projects that commercial lenders were beginning. How can people of faith act to respond in a sputtering financial market?
Poverty and privilege have at least one thing in common — they are both about choice, or lack of the same. This first struck me most powerfully during my first trip to Ghana several years ago. I only had to be there a few days when I realized that my most valuable possession wasn’t my laptop or my camera … but my American passport. With it I had the choice whether to stay or to go. Whether to make a life there or leave and make a life elsewhere.
The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministries is exploring a partnership with Volunteers in Medicine, a nonprofit organization that has helped to create
The brackets are set, the NCAA tournament bids are out — this year Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation invites you to add a little purpose to
Ms. Duflo, Mr. Banerjee and their colleagues have a simple, if radical, goal. They want to overhaul development aid so that more of it is spent on programs that actually make a difference. And they are trying to do so in a way that skirts the long-running ideological debate between aid groups and their critics.
There are numerous misconceptions about the way society at large, and relief agencies in specific, ought to respond to large-scale disasters. The mistakes are outlined
Mention globalisation and most people think of goods heading across the world from East to West and dollars moving in the other direction. Yet globalisation works for ideas too. Take Brazil’s Bolsa Família (“Family Fund”) anti-poverty scheme, the largest of its kind in the world. Known in development jargon as a “conditional cash transfer” programme, it was modelled partly on a similar scheme in Mexico. After being tested on a vast scale in several Latin American countries, a refined version was recently implemented in New York City in an attempt to improve opportunities for children from poor families.
The Dioceses of North Carolina and Botswana have entered into a formal companionship relation in spite of their theological differences. The Bishop of Botswana is quoted in an American newspaper article as saying “Let us beware of excommunicating each other here on Earth, for we shall find in heaven we are still bound together at the table of Christ’s love — Archbishop Akinola sitting next to Gene Robinson.”
It’s struck me over the last few weeks: I am “the rich” that the Bible talks about. If you and I have sufficient food, decent clothes, live in a house or apartment and have a reasonably reliable means of transportation, we’re among the top 15 percent of the world’s wealthy. That challenges my perspective. After all, I had all those things when I considered myself a “poor as a church mouse” college student.
On the fourth Thursday of each month volunteers from St. Stephen’s Episcopal and The Church of Hope ELCA gather to prepare lunches to take to the HIV and AIDS patients at the Los Angeles County Hospital and USC Medical Center. The group has been preparing lunches for over five years. The luncheon project was started 20 years ago by a Los Angeles synagogue.