In his message, which will be broadcast Sept. 12 over our 200-station network, President [Jimmy] Carter had this to say:

All people of faith who take the Bible seriously — both the New Testament and the Hebrew text–very much agree that God’s heart is with the poor and the vulnerable. Jesus proclaimed at the beginning of his early ministry that he had come to “bring good news to the poor.” The Bible includes several thousand verses on the poor and on God’s response to injustice.

This eminent Sunday school teacher (he still teaches two or three Sundays a month at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga.) is the special capstone speaker for our “Day 1” series on “Faith & Global Hunger.” The first four episodes in the series aired on consecutive Sundays from June 13-July 4 (for transcripts, audio, and video of the series, visit http://hunger.day1.org).

This series features notable church leaders discussing the issue of global poverty and how the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MGD) can address that issue….

The Right Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, issued a passionate call to serve the poor individually and corporately in his sermon “Can I Get a Witness?” …

Read it all.

At one level the World Cup has been a short-term boon. Tourists emptied out of the tour buses, made purchases from street merchants and visited the Hector Pieterson Museum situated across the street from Holy Cross. They got back on the buses to return to their hotels in suburbs with high walls, confident that they saw the real Soweto.

“I live on the other side of Soweto and I haven’t seen a tour bus yet,” [Anglican priest Stepehn] Morero said.

But now that the monthlong circus has left town, the hard questions that were raised by community activists before the World Cup are back: Who won? Who lost?

The event has generally been hailed as a great success, with talk now turning to a South African Olympics as a possibility. New stadiums were constructed along with new roads leading to the stadiums, construction that helped create thousands of jobs. But is South Africa ”” and a majority of South Africans ”” better off than before the World Cup came to town?

“How much of the profit FIFA makes will be left to develop the poor communities?” Morero said. “I do not think it is going to move the ball forward. There has been a concern from the community over who profits from the World Cup.”

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(Anglican Journal) A prominent Canadian senator and retired general has challenged world religious leaders to offer a vision of what the world can be, saying political leaders are simply reacting and “swimming in the complexity and ambiguity of our time.”

The world hasn’t seen statesmanship in this era of “new world disorder,” said Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, widely known as the commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in 1993 that tried to stop the genocide in Rwanda. “What world leaders are doing is leadership by crisis management”¦We are not shaping the future but reacting to it.”

Read it all.

The president of a Christian anti-hunger lobbying group won the premier award for fighting world hunger.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton awarded the World Food Prize to Bread for the World President David Beckmann at the State Department on Wednesday (June 16).

Beckmann, an economist and ordained Lutheran minister, shared the $250,000 prize with Jo Luck, president of Heifer International.

Read it all.

New statistics show that the overall number of homeless people in America dropped slightly last year ”” although the number of homeless families rose 7 percent.

The report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development comes a week before the Obama administration plans to announce the first national proposal to prevent and end homelessness.

About 1.56 million people spent at least one night in an emergency shelter in 2009, according to the HUD report. The number was 1.6 million the year before. And that was at a time of high unemployment and record high foreclosure rates.

Read or listen to it all.

What does the U.S. have in common with countries in sub-Saharan Africa?

Both waste large, obscene amounts of food. Better knowledge and technology would reduce food waste, deter environmental damage and, especially in that region of the African continent, reduce the number of people who go hungry each day.

In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 265 million people are hungry, heightening the travesty of the food waste problem. More than a quarter of the food produced in Africa spoils before it is eaten. Farmers battle post-harvest losses caused by severe weather, disease and pests, or poor harvesting and storage techniques. Annual post-harvest losses for cereal grains, roots and tuber crops, fruits, vegetables, meat, milk and fish amount to some 100 million tons, or $48 million worth of food.

To prevent these losses in Africa and elsewhere, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is trying to provide the information and technology to begin turning this tide….

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Maybe the Catholic Church should be turned upside down.

Jesus wasn’t known for pontificating from palaces, covering up scandals, or issuing Paleolithic edicts on social issues. Does anyone think he would have protected clergymen who raped children?

Yet if the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests ”” notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

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Since ancient times, one of the world’s most terrifying ailments has been caused by what the Bible calls “the fiery serpent,” now known as Guinea worm.

Guinea worms grow up to a yard long inside the body and finally poke out through the skin. They cause excruciating pain and must be pulled out slowly, an inch or two a day. In endemic areas like this district in Lakes State of southern Sudan, people can have a dozen Guinea worms dangling from their bodies.

Yet this is a good news column.

This district is, in fact, one of the last places on earth with Guinea worms. If all goes well, Guinea worms will be eradicated worldwide in the next couple of years ”” only the second disease ever to be eliminated, after smallpox.

For the last 24 years, former President Jimmy Carter has led the global struggle against the disease. When he started, there were 3.5 million cases annually in 20 countries. Last year, there were fewer than 3,200 cases in four countries: Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan. The great majority of the remaining cases are here in southern Sudan.

Read it all.

Two years into a merciless downward spiral, Antonio Moore was threatened with living on the street.

He had lost his $75,000-a-year job as a mortgage consultant, his three-bedroom house with a Jacuzzi, his Lexus sedan. He could no longer pay even the rent on his cramped studio apartment ”” not on his $10-an-hour part-time job as a fry cook at a fast food restaurant.

Faced with eviction, he was staring last month at the imminent prospect of joining the teeming ranks of the homeless. His last hope was a new $1.5 billion federal program aimed at preventing that fate. Within days of applying, a check for $775 was on its way to Mr. Moore’s landlord, enabling him to stay ”” at least for now.

Much like the Great Depression, when millions of previously working people came to rely on a new social safety net for their sustenance, a swelling group of formerly middle-class Americans like Mr. Moore, 30, is seeking government aid for the first time. Without help, say economists, many are at risk of slipping permanently into poverty, even as economic conditions improve.

Read it all.

The central Nigerian city of Jos is at the crossroads of the country’s Muslim-dominated north and the mainly Christian and animist south. In recent months, renewed clashes between Muslim and Christian communities there have left hundreds dead.

Nigerian authorities are under mounting pressure to prosecute those behind the unrest. Nighttime curfews and an increased military and police presence are maintaining order ”” for now.

But observers warn that while religion may be the fault line for a decade of periodic fighting, underlying grievances in Jos go much deeper. The area is plagued by poverty, joblessness and fierce competition over land and scarce resources.

Read or listen to it all.

Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.

Mr. McGowan went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.

Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.

All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice. And on that practice, this atheist felt lacking. To put it in church slang, he was convicted.

Rather than adopt faith, however, Mr. McGowan set out to emulate it, or at least its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate….

Read it all

Many more elderly Americans could face…uncertainty in [the] coming years.

A report released Monday by the National Alliance to End Homelessness projects a 33 percent increase over the next decade in elderly people who are homeless.

That would mean that today’s estimate of 44,172 homeless over age 62 would climb to 58,772.

Officials last year counted only nine homeless people over age 65 in Sedgwick County. But 39 people ages 55 to 64 reported being homeless, hinting at the potential for an increase.

The growth could have “huge implications” for everyone and should be seen as evidence that a more expansive safety net of social services will soon be needed, said Nan Roman, president of the alliance.

Read it all.

And so his question to all those who have the freedom to speak in the Church and for the Church is ‘who do you really speak for?’ But if we take seriously the underlying theme of his words and witness, that question is also, ‘who do you really feel with?’ Are you immersed in the real life of the Body, or is your life in Christ seen only as having the same sentiments as the powerful? Sentir con la Iglesia in the sense in which the mature Romero learned those words is what will teach you how to speak on behalf of the Body. And we must make no mistake about what this can entail: Romero knew that this kind of ‘feeling with the Church’ could only mean taking risks with and for the Body of Christ ”“ so that, as he later put it, in words that are still shocking and sobering, it would be ‘sad’ if priests in such a context were not being killed alongside their flock. As of course they were in El Salvador, again and again in those nightmare years.

But he never suggests that speaking on behalf of the Body is the responsibility of a spiritual elite. He never dramatised the role of the priest so as to play down the responsibility of the people. If every priest and bishop were silenced, he said, ‘each of you will have to be God’s microphone. Each of you will have to be a messenger, a prophet. The Church will always exist as long as even one baptized person is alive.’ Each part of the Body, because it shares the sufferings of the whole ”“ and the hope and radiance of the whole ”“ has authority to speak out of that common life in the crucified and risen Jesus.

So Romero’s question and challenge is addressed to all of us, not only those who have the privilege of some sort of public megaphone for their voices. The Church is maintained in truth; and the whole Church has to be a community where truth is told about the abuses of power and the cries of the vulnerable. Once again, if we are serious about sentir con la Iglesia, we ask not only who we are speaking for but whose voice still needs to be heard, in the Church and in society at large. The questions here are as grave as they were thirty years ago. In Salvador itself, the methods of repression familiar in Romero’s day were still common until very recently. We can at least celebrate the fact that the present head of state there has not only apologized for government collusion in Romero’s murder but has also spoken boldly on behalf of those whose environment and livelihood are threatened by the rapacity of the mining companies, who are set on a new round of exploitation in Salvador and whose critics have been abducted and butchered just as so many were three decades back. The skies are not clear: our own Anglican bishop in Salvador was attacked ten days ago by unknown enemies; but the signs of hope are there, and the will to defend the poor and heal the wounds.

Read it all (there is an audio link for those who wish to listen also).

Shortly after the Civil War, Andrew Carney, an Irish-born tailor who had made a small fortune selling uniforms to the US Navy, bequeathed $56,000 to a fledgling hospital in South Boston. He wanted it to serve the working class, “without distinction of creed, color, or nation.’’

Even in those early days, Boston’s Catholic hospital had financial problems. The Daughters of Charity who ran it “begged daily in the streets of Boston for the money and food to keep the hospital open and the indigent patients fed,’’ historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote in his book, “Boston Catholics.’’ When word got back to the archbishop of the hospital’s plight, he organized a grand bazaar to raise money. It took in $25,000 and put the hospital on firm financial ground.

Nearly 150 years later, a private equity firm has stepped in with needed cash for the Carney and the other five hospitals in the Caritas Christi Health Care network, which have struggled in recent years to meet their mission to provide care to the poor, while making the improvements necessary to survive in a cutthroat and increasingly complex industry.

The firm, Cerberus Capital Management, has promised the hospitals will continue to be run as Catholic institutions, in accordance with Catholic teachings that prohibit procedures the church considers to be immoral, such as abortion and sterilization. Hospital leaders have cast the deal as a way to preserve Catholic health care in Boston.

Read it all from the Boston Globe.

A young man in El Salvador, Luis González, told me recently: “Monsignor Romero provided a means through which social protest could be expressed. If a poor person said that beans were expensive, they were killed. No one could talk. But he could say those kinds of things.

Thirty years on from his death, Romero’s life and murder is a challenge to the church and to all believers: are we prepared to actually put that power at the service of others, and to fight for justice for the world’s poor and marginalised, whatever the cost to ourselves?

Read it all.

Nickels, dimes and quarters added up quickly last Christmas despite the economic slump as Americans donated a record $139 million to the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle campaign.

“America is an incredibly generous nation and philanthropy is alive and well, despite the current economic conditions impacting so many,” said Commissioner Israel L. Gaither, national commander of the Salvation Army.

“We are grateful for every donor, volunteer and corporate partner for supporting the Salvation Army’s mission by giving more than ever during a time when some have so little to give.”

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It is hard for people in the rich world to imagine what it is like to live on $2 a day. But for those who do, the problem is often not just a low income, but an unpredictable one. Living on $2 a day frequently means living for ten days on $20 earned on a single day. The task of smoothing consumption is made more complicated if there is nowhere to store money safely. In an emergency, richer people might choose between dipping into their savings and borrowing. The choice for the great mass of the unbanked in the developing world is limited to whom to borrow from, often at great cost.

That they can borrow at all is partly due to the rapid growth of microfinance, which specialises in lending small amounts to poor people. Several big microfinance institutions (MFIs) also offer savings accounts: Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is a prominent example. But the industry remains dominated by credit, and the ability to save through an MFI is often linked to customers’ willingness to borrow from it. Of 166 MFIs surveyed in 2009 by the Microfinance Information Exchange, a think-tank, all offered credit but only 27% offered savings products. Advocates of a greater variety of financial services for the poor argue for more balance.

This may be on the horizon. More MFIs are becoming interested in the potential of savings, thanks partly to the global financial crisis….

Read it all.

Caught this on the morning run–really heartwarming. Watch it all.

As the attention of the public and Congress has been drawn away to other global hotspots, the Interfaith Sudan Working Group hopes U.S. lawmakers will assist Sudan in grappling with an upcoming election, a recent cease-fire agreement with a Darfur rebel group and a referendum on independence for southern Sudan.

“Political milestones such as the upcoming election, cease-fire agreements and referendum carry great promise and great peril,” said Ruth Messinger, president of the American Jewish World Service. “That’s why we need the U.S. government’s focused attention now. If the agreements and peace process fall apart, they can’t just be put back together, again.”

Read it all.

The statistics are numbing: About 40 million people in the United States live in poverty.

According to a report issued in January by the Brookings Institution, about 17.5 percent of the people in Nashville lived in poverty in 2008. That’s less than the 24.5 percent in Knoxville and the 23.1 percent in Memphis. Reports put the statewide number at 15.5 percent.

But such statistics are not going unnoticed.

Monday, Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and a task force released a report with 30 recommendations for reducing poverty here, with a goal of cutting the rate in half by 2020.

Read the whole piece.

As budget day approaches for Ontario, Anglicans are stepping up calls for the province to help those hardest hit by the recession.

In a brief called “Standing Together,” submitted to the Ontario government’s Pre-Budget Consultations, Archbishop Colin Johnson and the diocese’s Child Poverty Subcommittee urge the government to carry out the following steps to help people in poverty:

Ӣ A $100-per month Healthy Food Supplement for people receiving social assistance so they can afford a more healthy diet.
Ӣ Greater funding for affordable housing.
Ӣ Funding for a threatened child-care subsidy program for low-income families.

While agreeing that the government faces a major fiscal deficit, the brief notes society’s “colossal human deficit, of needless suffering, hardship and lost opportunity.” Foodbank usage soared by 19 per cent in Ontario in 2009, so that 374,000 Ontarians now use foodbanks.

Read it all.

Well, on balance the sad news is that [foreign aid] hasn’t worked. It hasn’t achieved the objectives that we had for the foreign aid program. The number one objective, of course, was to promote economic growth out of poverty for the aid receiving countries, and there we see a clear failure. The most aid-intensive countries have actually stagnated over the last fifty years. They’ve failed to see a rise in their living standards. That includes especially sub-Saharan Africa, some of the poorer Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

It’s been wasted both in actual corruption of aid money being stolen, because a lot of aid does go to very corrupt governments, and it’s also just been wasted bureaucratically by the ineffectual bureaucracies and the aid organizations themselves and in the ineffectual bureaucracies of the governments that receive the aid money.

Most of the success stories did not get a lot of aid, and most of the countries that did get a lot of aid are not success stories. We always have something in statistics we call confirmation bias, that if you strongly believe a given idea like aid works then you select a couple examples that fit the story. But when we look at the whole range of experience of success and failure, I’m afraid there is no reason to believe that aid has contributed to success.

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A decade ago, New York City officials were so reluctant to give out food stamps, they made people register one day and return the next just to get an application. The welfare commissioner said the program caused dependency and the poor were “better off” without it.

Now the city urges the needy to seek aid (in languages from Albanian to Yiddish). Neighborhood groups recruit clients at churches and grocery stores, with materials that all but proclaim a civic duty to apply ”” to “help New York farmers, grocers, and businesses.” There is even a program on Rikers Island to enroll inmates leaving the jail.

“Applying for food stamps is easier than ever,” city posters say.

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Of the 30-odd attempted terrorist plots against the United States or American installations abroad that have been foiled since 9/11, roughly a third have been uncovered in the past year alone. What is new, and particularly frightening, about these recent attempts is that the budding perpetrators were initially indoctrinated inside the United States, with help from extremist websites or Islamic preachers. It was only after they had been brought some ways along the road to holy war that at least some of these would-be jihadists sought training and logistical support from al-Qaeda and others overseas. . . .

While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.

–James Kirchick, “The Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” Commentary (February 2010), pp.17-18

I have been exploring the funeral and burial customs of impoverished people in the Latino community of upstate South Carolina. I began doing this recently after considering the high cost of funerals in general.

Some impoverished Latinos could not claim the bodies of their deceased because they could not pay for a burial or have the loved one returned to the home country.

Horror stories from the field made me uncomfortable. As an educator, my mind scanned “disenfranchised grief” sections of my textbooks and workshop handouts.

Not being able to grieve and mourn according to custom is a great loss to bear. The mourning is made worse in environments where the grievers are not recognized by the larger society as people entitled to experience their grief.

Read the whole thing.

When I listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, I’m always curious as to why many of us overlook the opening statements of his 1963 address. It’s as if we only hear one side of his speech. Why do we quickly repeat the words “I have a dream,” and not the words “America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation….”

In 2010, poverty can disguise itself by hiding behind unemployment lines, housing foreclosures and the inability of a young person to afford a college education. When we look around our nation, many businesses are suffering from insufficient funds, as are too many families.

Once again, we wonder if the great vaults of America are still rich with opportunities for everyone.

The “fierce urgency of now” is what King mentioned back in 1963. But how long is “now”?

Read or listen to it all.

The United States has more poor children now than it did a year ago.

As recession-hammered families increase, more are using food stamps to feed their kids, according to a study by the Brookings Institution and First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy group.

“They are a really good barometer, a kind of economic-needs test,” said Mark R. Rank, an expert on social welfare programs at Washington University in St. Louis. “If you’re receiving food stamps and you’re a child, by definition, you’re in poverty.”

Read the whole article.

Oregon is one of several states that provides funding for so-called indigent burials. Historically, this money pays for a final service for people with no home or relatives. But in 2009, Gunson says, an unprecedented number of bodies went unclaimed ”” some for a month or more ”” not because family couldn’t be found, but because the economy has left families unable to pay for even the most basic $500 cremation.

“We don’t really want to become a storage place,” she says.

The trend is elusive to track. In Oregon, demand on the indigent burial fund was so high last year, the Legislature had to nearly triple fees on death certificates to keep the fund solvent. Illinois received so many requests for burial help that its fund was temporarily shut down over the summer. And in Michigan, where the economy hemorrhaged 300,000 jobs last year, indigent burials nearly doubled, from 2008’s 603 to more than 1,100.

Read or listen to it all.

Frigid Nights of the sort that we have been experiencing this week beg the question of whether Columbia’s homeless have proper shelter.

Fortunately, Columbia’s Winter Homeless Shelter, with a little more than 200 beds, is open. But while we suspect the shelter will function better than it ever has before, now that it is operated by The Cooperative Ministry and the USC School of Medicine, it alone isn’t enough to meet the needs of the city’s homeless. There are an estimated 900 homeless people in Richland County – and that estimate is quite likely low.

While the city and others make gallant efforts to ensure people at least have some place to go to keep warm, the fact is that simply trying to keep homeless people from freezing to death during winter months isn’t enough. The Oliver Gospel Mission, which focuses on turning around lives, does what it does well, but its reach is limited; the same can be said for other shelters, programs and advocates who work tirelessly to help the homeless. The bottom line is we aren’t doing enough.

Read the whole editorial from South Carolina’s largest newspaper.

IF THE world appears to have escaped relatively unscathed by social unrest in 2009, despite suffering the worst recession since the 1930s, it might just prove the lull before the storm. Despite a tentative global recovery, for many people around the world economic and social conditions will continue to deteriorate in 2010. An estimated 60m people worldwide will lose their jobs. Poverty rates will continue to rise, with 200m people at risk of joining the ranks of those living on less than $2 a day. But poverty alone does not spark unrest””exaggerated income inequalities, poor governance, lack of social provision and ethnic tensions are all elements of the brew that foments unrest.

Take a look at the chart and the comments if you have time.