poverty

As Père Diegue surveyed the unfinished classroom, he remarked: “I’m beginning to understand why I am here.”

Making work a prerequisite for benefits is costly, inefficient, and ineffective.

More than a memoir, Kate Hennessy's book about her grandmother is a participant biography written from the inside out.

Poverty of spirit, like any kind of poverty, is unenviable but survivable.

Who I'd invite to my writers' dinner party

Jesus isn’t pitting himself against poor people. He’s one of them.

Decades worth of data have proven that poverty shortens lives. Will anyone respond?

As we make laws and try to adjudicate justice, we often lose sight of the human faces affected.

More jobs would help, says J. D. Vance. So would a stronger work ethic.

Overall, though, it was a moving book that certainly had me reflecting on the fragility of my own journey, and the many ways it could have continued down a very different path that where I find myself today. Hopefully such a book would open us up to our shared humanity and make us less likely to use one dimensional categories like “thugs,” and “those people” to define other people. We would all be more compassionate if we identified more deeply with those whose journeys have taken hard and painful turns.

The prayers of the people call us. When we answer, we invite the possibility that it is we who will be poor, hungry, sick, and in prison.

In poor communities like the one where I live and work, evictions are not the exception. They’re the norm.

Even if increased equity were to involve a slightly smaller pie, the resulting social order may be preferred. When poverty declines, the social costs of poverty fall, and despair is replaced by hope.

Some small good news for American low-wage workers: Walmart is increasing its wages at the low end. By April, no Walmart employee will make less than $9 an hour; a year from now it’ll be $10. The retailer is also moving to improve its scheduling practices, a source of worker complaints.

Walmart’s decision is a voluntary one, made for business reasons.

A report released today by the Children’s Defense Fund details how the U.S. could reduce child poverty by 60 percent.

Specific targets are important in anti-poverty work, and this is an ambitious one (though less ambitious than the report’s title, Ending Child Poverty Now). CDF’s policy proposals include a larger Earned Income Tax Credit and (not or) a higher minimum wage, along with expanded housing subsidies, child care subsidies, and food stamps. Add some more generous rules for tax credit refunds and child support recipients’ federal benefits—along with a new subsidized jobs program—and the whole thing starts to sound pretty expensive.

At such ideologically charged times, it is hard to discern what a life of Christian faithfulness looks like. Miguel De La Torre offers a good resource.

Some modest good news this week from the Census Bureau [pdf]: for the first time since the Great Recession began, the poverty rate is down a little and the child poverty rate is down a little more. The latter was driven by a bit of job growth and—among families with children—higher income.

But at this pace it'll take years for the poverty rate to get back down just to where it was in 2000.

Reading David Brooks sometimes makes me want to tear my newspaper to shreds, throw the shreds in the fireplace, and douse them in something that burns even faster. Of course, my fireplace is decorative and my newspaper’s actually a laptop, so I control myself.

Brooks would approve. He likes self-control.