Earlier this year I was in charge of “debriefing” a small group of evangelical college students who had spent their spring break working with various agencies serving the homeless in inner-city Washington. Though they all had their own thoughts about what caused the poverty they had witnessed, . . . . Continue Reading »
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, published in 1984, examined the debate on poverty in British thought from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations of 1776 through the mid-nineteenth century. The book was remarkable for its scope. It followed . . . . Continue Reading »
The white man has laid down his burdenin the middle of Broadwayand under the exhausted plane treesblack men lie like ragson the benches where onceold white ladies chirped in a rowwatching industrialized . . . . Continue Reading »
Some will protest that the question posed by that title is outrageously wrongheaded. To ask what we should do about the poor, they say, smacks of paternalism and noblesse oblige, reflecting a hierarchical mentality in which, the world is divided between “us” and “them.” Rather, they would . . . . Continue Reading »
The Urban Underclassedited by christopher jencks and paul e. petersonbrookings institution publications, 490 pages, $34.95 Inner-City Poverty in the United Statesedited by lawrence e. lynn, jr. and michael h. mcgearynational academy press, 280 pages, $29.95 The presence of entrenched poverty and . . . . Continue Reading »
Liberalism must jettison the dead-end politics of . . . . Continue Reading »
When we come to measure the success of a presidency, it matters a great deal whether the administration in question made life better or worse for the poor. A culture whose values spring from Judaism, Christianity, and a compassionate humanism cannot be satisfied unless the poor are well cared for. . . . . Continue Reading »
Perhaps the most striking feature of our contemporary political landscape is the failure of the tattered labels “liberal” and “conservative” any longer to convey useful distinctions. In my own field of education policy, for example, those who get called conservative are in fact deeply . . . . Continue Reading »
The Woodstock Center at Georgetown University is where some distinguished Jesuits, and some less distinguished Jesuits, fiddle with their theological fretwork. A recent Woodstock Report is entirely given over to fretting about today’s favorite crisis, the environment. It comes with a recommended . . . . Continue Reading »
The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare by michael b. katz pantheon books, 293 pages, $22.95 In The Undeserving Poor, there are two Michael Katzes on view, the historian and the social commentator, and the former is much the more persuasive. Katz, who teaches . . . . Continue Reading »
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