Most Rev. Peter Akinola, Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, on Saturday urged Nigeria’s political leaders to work toward the reduction of poverty in the country. Akinola made the call in Ile-Ife during the interdenominational service held to commemorate the 80th birthday anniversary of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Okunade Sijuwade, Olubuse II.

He noted that Nigeria had abundant resources that could be harnessed and used to enhance the citizens’ living standards, adding that the bane of the country was crass mismanagement, corruption and other forms of malfeasance.”In the midst of abundance, Nigerians now use second-hand clothes, cars and other materials, as they cannot afford to purchase new products due to hardship,” he said.

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After an improbable rise from the Bronx projects to a job selling Gulf Coast homes, Isabel Bermudez lost it all to an epic housing bust ”” the six-figure income, the house with the pool and the investment property.

Now, as she papers the county with résumés and girds herself for rejection, she is supporting two daughters on an income that inspires a double take: zero dollars in monthly cash and a few hundred dollars in food stamps.

With food-stamp use at a record high and surging by the day, Ms. Bermudez belongs to an overlooked subgroup that is growing especially fast: recipients with no cash income.

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times.

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In every major city in Canada, you can see people, huddled over grates, covered with sleeping bags, taking shelter in entrance ways to stay warm. The plight of the homeless is most troubling as winter comes to Canada, but it is a dangerous, precarious situation at any time. Sometimes those who lack affordable housing struggle in less visible ways, one rent cheque away from disaster.

Anglicans across the country are looking for ways to work for change. In November, Virginia Platt, a parishioner at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, was part of a group picketing a decommissioned military base in the city. The Right to Housing Coalition, of which the diocese of Rupert’s Land is a member, was protesting the fact that more than 100 houses on the base have remained empty for the past five years, costing $1.5 million per year to heat and maintain. The coalition is calling on the federal government to permit the houses to be used as transitional housing for families who lack affordable housing.

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Whenever Robert Carlisle leaves his modest apartment on Cleveland’s near west side, he turns off the heat so he can save a little money on his gas bill for a pair of shoes or a bus pass. He does the same at night when he climbs into bed under an extra blanket.

Turning down the heat is an easy step to take, Carlisle said after breakfast Dec. 30 at the West Side Catholic Center, a few blocks from his home. It’s especially important, he said, when he’s “budgeting down to every penny.”

What little money Carlisle earns from odd jobs is used for necessities, mainly rent and utilities, leaving little for food. So he visits the West Side Catholic Center for meals and even to shower. The money he saves on heating water and on a light breakfast or lunch can mean the difference between having a roof over his head or living in the streets.

“I come here because it does help offset my income,” said Carlisle, 42.

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With 30 hours of help a week, Christina Stewart could care for her mentally and physically disabled 9-year-old daughter, but come Friday her ability to keep the child at home will be put in jeopardy.

Hundreds of families will be put in the same position as the new year rings in, and at-home services for disabled residents are dramatically scaled back.

For Stewart, the number of hours of help available to care for her daughter, Camille, will be cut almost in half.

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Watch for the answer to the question “what’s the greatest compliment you can receive?”

“The tenor of the calls has changed,” said Barry Waldman, vice president of communications for Trident United Way. “Two years ago, it was all people who were chronically poor and didn’t know how to go about getting help. And now we get calls from people who had a job, are desperate to get work again and can’t believe they are in this situation.”

Waldman said it has become a conundrum for nonprofits across the Lowcountry and the nation: The need for their services is reaching record levels while many of the people who once donated to these charities are unable to do so and now need help themselves.

With the state’s unemployment rate over 12 percent, more people are struggling to make the rent, pay their utilities and even buy groceries. The Lowcountry Food Bank, which distributes food to many other charitable organizations, has sent out 40 percent more food than it did last year.

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A[n] [Anglican] priest from York has been criticised by police for “highly irresponsible” comments in a sermon advising desperate people to shoplift.Father Tim Jones, 41, claimed on Sunday that stealing from large national chains was sometimes the best option open to vulnerable people.

He added that it was far better for people desperate during the recession to shoplift than turn to “prostitution, mugging or burglary”….

Delivering his Nativity message at St Lawrence C of E Church in York, Father Jones told the congregation: “My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift.

“I would ask that they do not steal from small family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices.

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With poverty, hunger and environmental degradation on the rise worldwide, people must do all they can to not waste precious food, said Cardinal Renato Martino.

“In developed countries every year, 30 percent of foodstuffs are wasted, ending up in the garbage,” he said, adding that during the Christmas holidays the amount of wasted food rises to 40 percent.

In the United States, however, up to half its food supply is wasted year round, he said.

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Growing old has never been easy. But in isolated, rural spots like this, it is harder still, especially as the battering ram of recession and budget cuts to programs for the elderly sweep through many local and state governments.

Ms. [Norma] Clark has been able to get help since her fall two winters ago because Wyoming, thanks to its energy boom, continues to finance programs for the elderly. But at least 24 states have cut back on such programs, according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group, and hundreds of millions of dollars in further cuts are on the table next year.

The difficulties are especially pronounced in rural America because, census data shows, the country’s most rapidly aging places are not the ones that people flock to in retirement, but rather the withering, remote places many of them flee. Young people, for decades now, have been an export commodity in towns like Lingle, shipped out for education and jobs, most never to return. The elderly who remain ”” increasingly isolated and stranded ”” face an existence that is distinctively harder by virtue, or curse, of geography than life in cities and suburbs. Public transportation is almost unheard of. Medical care is accessible in some places, absent in others, and cellphone service can be unreliable.

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More than a million American households lost access to basic banking services like savings accounts last year, bank regulators say.

Those families are among 30 million households that have little or no access to such services, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Poor, minority and immigrant families are especially hard-hit.

In all, 25.6 percent of U.S. households either lack bank accounts or use payday loans, check-cashing services and other costly alternatives to traditional banks, according to the survey.

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MR. GREGORY: We think about Thanksgiving, we think about giving and being thankful for blessings.

MR. WARREN: Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY: You have talked about giving in your own life. You’ve acted on giving. You give.

MR. WARREN: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: And you say that it’s not a sin to be rich, but it’s a sin to die rich.

MR. WARREN: I believe that. That’s a personal conviction of mine. You know, thanks and giving go together. You, you can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving. You spell love G-I-V-E. Probably the most famous verse in the Bible is John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his son.” The Bible says every good gift comes from God. We’re most like God when we’re giving, when we’re generous, because everything we have is a gift. And I’ve gone on this journey for many years.

Read it all or if you prefer there is a link to the videos to be watched if you prefer that format.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before, some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming, and who need assistance this year over the other years we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and a country as great as this country, we shouldn’t have people doing that.

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Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and evangelical leaders stood together Friday to release the Manhattan Declaration, a statement of Christian convictions on the matters of life, family, and religious liberty.

Chuck Colson, head of Prison Fellowship and one of the initiators of the declaration, told me after document’s release, “I can’t find any other case, in modern times at least, when you’ve had such a representation.” Upon its release, the declaration had 148 signatories including pastors, professors, bishops, economists, and nonprofit leaders. WORLD’s founder Joel Belz and editor in chief Marvin Olasky are both signatories. By late afternoon, 1,600 had signed on the declaration’s website.

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We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

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Almighty God, by whose grace thy servant Elizabeth of Hungary recognized and honored Jesus in the poor of this world: Grant that we, following her example, may with love and gladness serve those in any need or trouble, in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Hunger is the most cruel and concrete sign of poverty. Opulence and waste are no longer acceptable when the tragedy of hunger is assuming ever greater proportions. Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Catholic Church will always be concerned for efforts to defeat hunger; the Church is committed to support, by word and deed, the action taken in solidarity ”“ planned, responsible and regulated ”“ to which all members of the international community are called to contribute. The Church does not wish to interfere in political decisions: she respects the knowledge gained through scientific study, and decisions arrived at through reason responsibly enlightened by authentically human values, and she supports the effort to eliminate hunger. This is the most immediate and concrete sign of solidarity inspired by charity, and it brooks neither delay nor compromise. Such solidarity relies on technology, laws and institutions to meet the aspirations of individuals, communities and entire peoples, yet it must not exclude the religious dimension, with all the spiritual energy that it brings, and its promotion of the human person. Acknowledgment of the transcendental worth of every man and every woman is still the first step towards the conversion of heart that underpins the commitment to eradicate deprivation, hunger and poverty in all their forms.

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The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a federal report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million youngsters the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

Among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

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Many Americans think they live in a society which, more than most, offers citizens the chance to prosper. The US is not the most equal society in the world, and does not want to be. What matters is that a poor man can raise himself up.

Creating an Opportunity Society begins by showing that, especially for the poorest children, this is something of a myth. By international standards, intergenerational mobility in the US is quite low. This will surprise few who have ventured into a US public housing project or troubled inner-city school, but many middle-class Americans never have. The figures show that US children born in the lowest and highest quintiles of the income distribution are more likely to stay there than in Britain, for example, and much more likely than in countries such as Sweden and Denmark.

But what to do about it? The book confirms a finding well established in the literature, that transition to the middle class is all but guaranteed for poor children if they do three things: finish high school, work full time and marry before having children. The US underperforms as an opportunity society because so many of its young people fail at one or more. The book focuses on these areas.

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Speaking in support of new initiatives on Tuesday, Steven Berg of the National Alliance to End Homelessness said the problem shouldn’t be viewed as inevitable.

“We know a great deal about the pathways into homelessness,” he said in testimony to Congress, and also about “the interventions and program models which are effective in offering reconnection to community, and stable housing.”

Prevention efforts may be especially important for Americans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, experts say, because the likelihood of vets being homeless is greatest about seven years after they leave military service.

Bills under review in Congress include a range of measures, such as 60,000 new housing vouchers from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), targeted at the number of vets estimated to be chronically homeless due to problems such as mental illness. Other provisions would target new money toward community or faith-based groups to provide support for homeless vets. One bill focuses especially on support for vets who are single parents.

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Half of American kids will live in households receiving food stamps before age 20, according to a study reported Monday in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Although one in five children rely on food stamps for years, many more live in families who turn to food stamps during a short-term crisis, says author Mark Rank of Washington University in St. Louis. He analyzed 30 years of data from the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey.

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The woman who heads the area Anglican diocese has a question nagging at her, a question she spoke about passionately during a recent sermon at St. John’s the Baptist Episcopal Church in the Seacliff area.

That question is whether a 12-year-old Tanzanian boy named Sadiki would still be alive if she had not encountered him one day, in March, in a remote area of that East African country.

Bishop Mary Gray-Reeves told of that brief encounter movingly and with self-reproach.

It is a story that changed her life, the boy’s life and struck a chord with many others, Gray-Reeves said. It is undeniably tragic, yet growth has sprung from it.

The chance meeting with a disfigured child — an epileptic scarred and infected after falling into a cooking fire during a seizure — has led to a campaign by church members in the diocese to provide solar cooking classes, scholarships and other help to the boy’s village.

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Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.

The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)

Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.

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Parishioners at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Edmonton will be on their feet during this Sunday’s service. Participating for the third year in the “Stand Up, Take Action to End Poverty” event, they are part of a grass-roots global movement to push world leaders to live up to their commitments to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which included eradicating extreme poverty.

Last year, the campaign recorded 116 million people participating, which broke a Guinness world record for the largest mobilization around a single cause, and organizers are hoping to have significantly more people involved this year in events held around the world from Oct. 16 to 18.

Inspired by a study of Micah 6:8, “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God,” the youth at St. Paul’s got the congregation involved in this campaign, youth pastor Amy Croy said.

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The first time I noticed it was at the end of an interview with a shy teenage boy in Baltimore. His name was Cortasz Steele and he was from one of the city’s toughest high schools. He was telling me how much he liked working as a volunteer with other kids at the city’s teen court.

“Everybody needs somebody to talk to. We go through a lot when we go home and then come to teen court ”” and, like, they just needed somebody to talk to,” he said.

When he and I finished talking, I stuck out my hand to shake his, as I usually do. But instead, Steele approached awkwardly, put his arms around my shoulders and gave me a big, warm hug.

Now, that never happened when I covered homeland security!

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Failure to act by governments and international institutions has left more than 1 billion around the world undernourished, according to a coalition of religious, human rights and development groups.

“Despite record grain crops worldwide, the number of undernourished people in the world reached in 2009 the historically high figure of 1.02 billion people, about 100 million more than in 2008,” says a report released Monday (Oct. 12) by a coalition of groups including Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, the Swiss Protestant agency Bread for All and the FoodFirst Information and Action Network.

The worldwide recession that started last year “pushed aside” the global food crisis, according to the report, “Who Controls the Governance of the World Food System.”

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This is a nice story–before you watch it, guess the estimated number of grandparents taking care of their grandchildren in America right now.

Around the world millions of children are not getting a proper education because their families are too poor to afford to send them to school. In India, one schoolboy is trying change that. In the first report in the BBC’s Hunger to Learn series, Damian Grammaticas meets Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children.

At 16 years old, Babar Ali must be the youngest headmaster in the world. He’s a teenager who is in charge of teaching hundreds of students in his family’s backyard, where he runs classes for poor children from his village.

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A year ago, the meetings began. Representatives from Mount Pleasant Presbyterian and several other East Cooper churches got together to discuss a collaborative approach to community service and worship.

They knew it wasn’t the first time such cooperation has been attempted; they knew that other efforts have met with various degrees of success or failure, according to Becky Van Wie, a Mount Pleasant Presbyterian member and associate director of the Lowcountry Continuum of Care Partnership.

Van Wie said the group met with people who have been around this block. Both Chuck Coward, executive director of Charleston Outreach, and the Rev. Bert Keller, pastor of Circular Congregational Church, explained some of the pitfalls, and both encouraged the nascent ecumenical team to forgo establishing a formal organizational structure for the time being and focus instead on action.

“Do something,” they said, according to Van Wie. That way others will see that the effort is about more than just good ideas and they’ll get involved.

Read it all from the Faith and Values section of the local paper.

If Grady Memorial Hospital succeeds in closing its outpatient dialysis clinic, Tadesse A. Amdago, a 69-year-old immigrant from Ethiopia, said he would begin “counting the days until I die.” Rosa Lira, 78, a permanent resident from Mexico, said she also assumed she “would just die.” Another woman, a 32-year-old illegal immigrant from Honduras, said she could only hope to make it “back to my country to die.”

The patients, who have relied for years on Grady’s free provision of dialysis to people without means, said they had no other options to obtain the care that is essential to their survival. But the safety-net hospital, after years of failed efforts to drain its red ink, is not backing away from what its chairman, A. D. Correll, calls a “gut-wrenching decision”: closing the clinic this month.

The sides confronted each other in state court on Wednesday morning as lawyers for the patients sought to keep the clinic open until other arrangements for dialysis could be secured. Dialysis patients and their families packed the benches and 60-year-old Nelson Tabares, a seriously ill illegal immigrant from Honduras, was wheeled into court in a portable bed.

Despite a judge’s urging that the two sides negotiate a solution Wednesday, there was no agreement by the end of the day on how to go forward. For the time being, a restraining order keeping the clinic open stands. The judge is considering whether to extend it.

The dialysis unit on Grady’s ninth floor might as well be ground zero for the national health care debate.

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