The panhandling problem has gotten so bad in recent months that the Rev. Michael Moran of the Spiritual Life Center in midtown Sacramento addressed the issue with his congregation Sunday. “What is the correct spiritual response to this?” he asked.
Witnessing inhumanity and indecency is very challenging. What people are asked to do here can lead to big questions. I’m not suggesting everyone will become an evangelical Christian but people start to ask questions and that’s a start. What all of us would prefer is a thought-through faith. This is a place where people do that for the first time.
The official child poverty rate grew by 18 percent and poverty levels for families with children increased in 38 states, according to a new study.
“Upper-class people, in spite of all their advantages, suffer empathy deficits,” Dr. Keltner said. “And there are enormous consequences.” In other words, a high-powered lawyer or chief executive, ill equipped to pick up on more-subtle emotions, doesn’t make for a sympathetic boss.
National and local studies make clear that congregations occupy an important but limited place in community social welfare systems. These studies also make clear that, far from constituting an alternative to that system, congregations’ social service activity depends on it.
A lot of people say churches’ only proper purview is voluntary, charitable work. But why should social activism stop at the church door and the volunteers’ hands? If Christ claims every square inch of life, why shouldn’t Jesus’ followers be as concerned with how the government spends money as with their neighbors who don’t have enough?
Max Bevan, a lifelong Episcopalian from New Jersey, and Kiyo Egashira of Washington state took a development economics class and read Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty” while studying abroad last semester. They began talking about how much Sachs’ book influenced their perception of the “poverty trap” in Africa and how “the way he approached the solution seemed feasible,” Bevan recalled.
Like the ancient “Fathers of the Church” King emphasized that “the least of these” are children and “icons” of God, whose treatment is the measure of our “salvation or damnation” as persons and as a nation. Like them he argued that excess wealth is “robbed from the poor.” Like them he cautioned us against the ineluctable tendency of consumption to addict us to status and power.
Martin Luther King gave his last Sunday sermon at Washington National Cathedral on March 31, 1968. Some of that sermon is reproduced below, but we
In San Francisco, most of the large, established non-profits who feed the hungry have big budgets, lots of staff, lots of overhead, many government contracts and grants, and a professionalized, social-service approach. The neighborhood food pantries, on the other hand, are run very cheaply, almost entirely by volunteers, many of them poor; they don’t employ development directors or staff to do screening and intake.