The Rt Revd Alastair Redfern, Bishop of Derby, has welcomed the post-2015 development agenda report of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel, co-chaired by David Cameron. The report, A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development, builds on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals experiment and calls for an end to absolute poverty by 2030.

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“A catalyst for change” across the Communion is how Archbishop Albert Chama of Central Africa describes the Alliance, as he takes on the position of Chair of the new Board of Trustees.

The Primate will be leading the Anglican Alliance into a new stage of its life as a charity with a global board, bringing forward a new programme for its development, relief and advocacy across the Anglican Communion.

“The Anglican Alliance can be a catalyst for change, bringing people together across the Communion in our shared mission to build a world free of poverty and injustice,” he said.

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[It is worth noting]… the Talmudic ruling that one of the duties of a parent is to teach your child a craft or trade through which he can earn a living. More pointed still was Maimonides’ famous statement that “The highest degree of charity, exceeded by none, is that of one who assists a poor person by providing him with a gift or a loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him to find employment ”“ in a word, by putting him where he can dispense with other people’s aid.” The supreme act of welfare is to help people into work so that they no longer need the help of others.

Judaism recognises that unemployment has a psychological as well as economic dimension. Jewish law represents the sustained attempt to create a society that honours human dignity, and an essential part of this is that everyone should have the opportunity to contribute to the common good through their own endeavour. As Psalm 128 says, “When you eat from the labour of your hands, you will be happy and it will be well for you.”

As a matter of religious principle, job creation must be at the centre of any long-term welfare policy. Human dignity requires no less.

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Humanitarian agencies are running low on funds to help millions of people affected by the war in Syria, prompting one United Nations official to warn: “Our capacity to do more is diminishing.”

Syria’s two-year-old war has fueled a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, U.N. officials say. The U.N.’s Security Council has demanded an end to the escalating violence and condemned human rights abuses by all sides.

“Our agencies and humanitarian partners have been doing all we can. The needs are growing, while our capacity to do more is diminishing,” U.N. Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos said in a video appealing for worldwide support of aid efforts.

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Some dodge the stones and bottles thrown at their tents in the dead of night, others watch helplessly as their tarpaulin shelters, huddled in camps sprawled across the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, are destroyed with knives and sticks.

Rights group Amnesty International has collected dozens of such testimonies from Haitians who have been kicked out of makeshift camps set up by those left homeless by the January 2010 earthquake. Many camp residents have moved out, but just over 320,000 Haitians still live in them.

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The bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts, which includes Worcester and surrounding communities, said today that he is against the proposal to locate at $200 million slots parlor on the former Wyman-Gordon Co. parcel in Green Island.

“For those who have little, the illusory chance that they can gain much, even in a game stacked against them, is tempting and ultimately destructive,” said Bishop Douglas J. Fisher. “Our churches stand with the economically poor of our society, and that always means taking a stand against gambling establishments in our cities.”

Bishop Fisher is the latest prominent church leader to take a stand against the proposal.

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Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby are among 80 religious leaders who have written to the G8 heads of government urging them to keep promises on foreign aid and to “help to create an environment that encourages the conditions for inclusive, equitable and sustainable economic growth.”

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When Leonard Williams attends the Easter service today at Shepherd’s Heart Fellowship, an Anglican church for the homeless in Uptown, like Christians everywhere he will be celebrating the resurrection of Christ from the tomb.

But Mr. Williams, 53, and others who attend Shepherd’s Heart also will be celebrating the new life that has been breathed into their church after a recent significant agreement between Pittsburgh’s Episcopal and Anglican dioceses. A long-running conflict in the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh resulted in a 2008 split, with many of the churches leaving and creating the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh, linked to the theologically conservative Anglican Church in North America.

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(Note that last season Dickey played with the New York Mets and he will be with Toronto this season–KSH).

This is Kamathipura, the red light district of Mumbai, among the most notorious sex-trafficking locations in the world. I am here as a guest of Bombay Teen Challenge (BTC), a charity that has been fighting human trafficking for more than 20 years, one I joined forces with last year, when two friends and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and raised $130,000 , much of it from generous and kind-hearted Mets fans. I have come with my two daughters, Gabriel, 11, and Lila, 9, to witness the fruits of our climb ”“ the conversion of a former brothel to a health clinic. I want my daughters to share the experience not so much as a gratitude check, but to learn that each of us has a capacity to make a difference in this world, and to see that God’s grace makes that possible.

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In America, all men are believed to be created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. But Nigerians are brought up to believe that our society consists of higher and lesser beings. Some are born to own and enjoy, while others are born to toil and endure.

The earliest indoctrination many of us have to this mind-set happens at home. Throughout my childhood, “househelps” ”” usually teenagers from poor families ”” came to live with my family, sometimes up to three or four of them at a time. In exchange for scrubbing, laundering, cooking, baby-sitting and everything else that brawn could accomplish, either they were sent to school, or their parents were sent regular cash.

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Take interstate highways between South Carolina’s largest metropolitan areas and the scene remains similar ”” thick forests, meandering rivers and lush farms punctuated with thriving suburbs and vibrant downtowns.

Get off those interstates and something else emerges ”” towns where poverty rules, illiteracy passes to children like an inherited disease, and diabetes strikes 9-year-olds because of bad diets and obesity.
This is the other South Carolina. It runs along the “Interstate-95 Corridor” through the mostly majority black counties made infamous by the “Corridor of Shame” documentary about inequities in public schools. It also includes the “Mill Crescent,” the swath of rural, largely white, old textile mill counties between the I-85 economic powerhouse and greater Columbia.

If you took this other South Carolina away, the state would no longer rank at the bottom of nearly every list you want it to be at the top of. Instead, it would basically mirror the nation as a whole in income, education and health.

Many crippling disparities linger in these metropolitan counties, but the areas have been pushed into the national mainstream by four decades of economic growth, desegregation and an influx of people from other states and countries with new ideas and high expectations.

The other South Carolina remains shrouded in despair by the legacies of slavery, dependence on a marginally educated workforce, and political and economic domination by an elite few.

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The Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Rev Stephen Platten, has called on people to pray for the whole food production chain from struggling farmers, in the UK and elsewhere, to those that do not have enough to eat.

Backing the Enough Food For Everyone If campaign, the Bishop emphasised the call for governments, companies and individuals to work together to take the necessary steps to reduce the millions currently going hungry and the amount of food wasted.

At the other end of the food chain, he added, those who produce food also need prayers. Farmers in the UK, for example, are facing cuts in their income of up to 50 per cent due to weather damage, according to latest estimates from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

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Imagine you were forced to leave your home? Given no option but to pack everything into one bag and to leave Northern Ireland.
That is exactly the situation that more than 500,000 Syrians have been forced into.

Into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan they continue to pour, in search of safety and shelter from the bombs and bullets that have killed 60,000 people. Three-and-a-half thousand crossed into Jordan last Wednesday alone.

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A coalition of leading human rights activists and scholars has asked that Congress press the Obama administration to end the growing humanitarian crisis in the largely Christian areas of southern Sudan, saying that the administration’s response to the crisis has been non-existent.

U.S. policy toward the continuing human tragedy in Sudan is “in the worst place it’s ever been,” said Mark C. Hackett, CEO and executive director of Memphis-based Operation Broken Silence. “It’s extremely disappointing.”

Hackett and other activists ”” at a Jan. 11 forum organized by the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. ”” said that they had spent Jan. 10-11 on Capitol Hill calling for the United States to intervene to stop the systematic attacks of villagers in the Nuba Mountains of southern Sudan by the forces of President Omar al-Bashir.

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(ACNS) West Africa’s new archbishop , the Most Revd Solomon Tilewa Johnson [in an interview this week] explained that one major priority was responding to issues of “abject poverty”, which is perhaps to be expected considering the countries that comprise the Anglican Province of West Africa: Cameroon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

More surprising, however, was a priority to retain congregants who might be tempted away to non-Anglican churches by newer forms of praise and worship. “We all have our priorities and the key issues for us in West Africa as far as I can see is the threat posed to us by the new churches for example,” he said.

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No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God””for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit, there can be no abundance of God.

–Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917-1980)

Brian Rants never thought his contribution to the world would be a $15 lamp. But for schoolchildren in Swaziland and earthquake survivors in Haiti, these solar lamps have made all the difference. Rants’s Denver-based company””Nokero, short for “no kerosene”””have allowed African students to read at night and increased safety for Haitian families living in tent cities. As vice president of marketing, Rants’s job is to get these lamps into the hands of millions of families in the developing world.

Since its founding in 2010, Nokero has sold over half a million solar lights and chargers in 120 countries, but Rants believes their work has just begun. With over a billion people worldwide still using kerosene as their primary fuel source, the need is vast. In a comprehensive study on the industry, The Economist lauded solar lights as the next big innovation for the world’s poor, noting that solar lighting is “falling in price, improving in quality and benefiting from new business models that make it more accessible and affordable to those at the bottom of the pyramid. And its spread is sustainable because it is being driven by market forces, not charity.”

Nokero’s lamps replace the need for kerosene lighting and eliminate the sweeping problems that accompany its use.

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Watch the whole video (just under 7 1/2 minutes).

To find Mundri on a map of South Sudan, go here. Then find Uganda and the part of South Sudan that borders Uganda. About in the middle and slight up to the left from the border you will see the major city of Juba. Now head northwest (follow yellowish line) to the next city on the map which is Mundri (Town)

The humanitarian crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was top of Pope Benedict XVI’s concerns this Wednesday as he began his greetings in Italian with another appeal for aid for the people of the nation, the scene of armed clashes and violence. Emer McCarthy reports:

“A large part of the population lacks the primary means of subsistence” said the Pope, adding that “thousands of residents have been forced to flee their homes to seek refuge elsewhere”.

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There are still far too many children in need today and I find it moving that Judaism and Christianity focus on their holiest days on the birth of a child. On the first day of the Jewish year we tell the story of the birth of the first Jewish child, to the elderly Abraham and Sarah who had almost given up hope. And Christmas tells the Christian story in a very similar way through the birth of a child ”“ because nothing more powerfully symbolises the miracle of every new human life, and at the same time its intense vulnerability. Children more than anything else evoke our sense of compassion, but their very powerlessness places them at the great risk of our neglect.

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[Emmanuel] Davidenkoff says the Socialist government doesn’t seem to understand the concerns of the working and middle class and in the name of equality, got it all wrong.

“Mostly, wealthy people don’t want homework because when the kids are at home, they make sports or dance or music. They go to the museums, to the theater. So they have this access to culture, which is very important,” he says. “In poor families, they don’t have that, so the only link they have with culture and school is homework.”

Elisabeth Zeboulon sits in her office over the playground. Today, she’s the principal at a private, bilingual school in Paris, but she spent most of her career in French public schools. Zeboulon says the centralized French education system doesn’t leave much room for trying different teaching methods….

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Q. Describe what you call the breakdown of marriage.

A. When the war on poverty began in the mid-’60s, about 7 percent of children were born outside of marriage. Today, that number is 42 percent. To discuss poverty in the United States and to leave out the decline of marriage is sort of like talking about geography and leaving out the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. The breakdown of marriage is the overwhelming reason why child poverty exists.

Q. Are people living together and not getting married?

A. You have a large number of single mothers. Sometimes, they are cohabitating with the father or a series of boyfriends. Those relationships are extremely unstable and won’t last. In New Jersey, roughly a third of all the families with children are single-parent families – and three out of four poor families….

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Gov. Sam Brownback’s newly formed task force on child poverty was told Monday that the increase in “non-marital births” was a leading cause of child poverty.

Ron Haskins, a senior fellow with The Brookings Institution, said that from a child’s perspective, “They need a mom, they need a dad, they need consistency ”¦ if that occurs it has major impacts on development.”

Haskins’ comments were made during the first meeting of the Governor’s Task Force on Reducing Childhood Poverty. Brownback appointed the group earlier this month.

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Ottawa’s homeless community has a brand new “living room” in the revamped basement of St. Alban’s Anglican Church at 454 King Edward Ave.

Centre 454, which provides a safe space for people in Ottawa who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, started its life in that basement in 1976, but moved to 216 Murray St. in 2000.

Now, after 12 years and more than a million dollars in renovations, the centre ”” and all its services ”” will again be located in St. Alban’s Anglican Church, Ottawa’s oldest surviving church, which was built in 1867 and attended by Sir John A. Macdonald.

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There were nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty in 2011, under an alternative measure released by the Census Bureau Wednesday.

That’s 16.1% of the nation, higher than the official poverty rate of 15%. The official rate, released in September, showed 46.6 million people living in poverty.

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Iranian warships have arrived in Port Sudan in an apparent show of support for the government in Khartoum, one week after it accused Israel of bombing an arms factory in the Sudanese capital.

Iran’s state news agency confirmed yesterday that two vessels, a destroyer and a helicopter carrier have docked in Sudan’s main port on the Red Sea and their commanders will be meeting Sudanese officials.

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For 33 years, Sánchez Gordillo has been mayor of Marinaleda, pop. 2,700, another farming settlement about 100 miles west of Jódar. Like Jódar, Marinaleda is mostly inhabited by jornaleros. Over the decades, Sánchez Gordillo has transformed the poor village into an islet of social justice and relative prosperity, with almost full employment through communal farming, low taxes, a salary of €1,200 ($1,572), food and housing considered as rights, and “direct democracy” exercised through frequent general assemblies. Sánchez Gordillo and his townsmen launched their movement to build what he calls “a communist utopia” after the death of general and dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, occupying land owned by a member of the royal family and distributing it for communal ownership as well as taking over local airports.

His efforts in Marinaleda long ago earned him a regional following, but Sánchez Gordillo and his lieutenant, the 57-year-old Diego Cañamero, the SAT union’s national spokesman, have gained renown in recent months with a series of controversial protests against the austerity measures embraced by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish government. On Aug. 7, the two led union members on raids on Carrefour (CA) and Mercadona supermarkets, leaving the stores with shopping carts full of “expropriated” food they gave away to the hungry poor.

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A German-American nun will become a saint Sunday, nearly a century after her death. Mother Marianne Cope is the second person to be honored in this way for caring for people in Hawaii with leprosy, now known as Hansen’s disease.

During a tragic era in Hawaiian history, more than 8,000 people with leprosy were banished to Kalaupapa, a remote peninsula on the island of Molokai. Back then, there was no cure. The patients were treated as outcasts until a Belgian priest, Father Damien, came to care for them in 1873. Eventually he contracted the disease himself and died. He was canonized by the pope in 2009.

Just five months before Damien’s death, Cope arrived in Kalaupapa. She worked in Hawaii in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Sister Alicia Damien Lau says Cope risked her life to care for people with leprosy.

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Dr Charles Reed the Church of England’s International and Development Affairs adviser said:
“World Food Day’s “fight hunger to reduce poverty” campaign reminds us of the continuing need for emergency supplies faced by many in our own country as well as abroad. Our churches support those in need in the developing world as well as in our own communities….

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World grain reserves are so dangerously low that severe weather in the United States or other food-exporting countries could trigger a major hunger crisis next year, the United Nations has warned.

Failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and other countries this year have eroded reserves to their lowest level since 1974. The US, which has experienced record heatwaves and droughts in 2012, now holds in reserve a historically low 6.5% of the maize that it expects to consume in the next year, says the UN.

“We’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

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