At best, a community’s accumulated power lies not just in its ability to tear others down but in a desire to use Grace-given resources to affirm what oppression never can – that all are worthy of love, care, life, and dignity.
We must learn to subvert the economic model of our rulers by reconnecting with older models based on reciprocity, hospitality, and love.
The number of people in the U.S. living below the poverty line in 2011 was 46.2 million, the highest in the more than 50 years that records have been kept.[i] (1961 is a few years before Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and about seven years before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the “Poor People’s Campaign” that would take Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis.) Why then is so little attention being paid to poverty and poverty-related issues in the current presidential campaign?…