“How do we move from the idea of poor people being sinners to poverty being a sin?”
…. “At Union Theological Seminary in New York City, a liberal school, students this year developed a nine-day course called the Poverty Immersion Experience to provide a practical grounding for the moral values discussion.
“How do you preach on poverty?” said Amy Gopp, one of the students who developed the course. “People rely on theological apathy – ‘The poor will always be with us’ – things that don’t demand that we do anything.”
On a blustery January morning, Ms. Gopp and 10 classmates piled into a rented van to meet with a group of formerly homeless people in northeast Philadelphia who had organized to protest their condition.
The intent of the course is to get students to think “beyond the soup kitchen” or charity work and consider how religious institutions can address the underlying structure of poverty, said Willie Baptist, who is a scholar-in-residence at the seminary. A community activist and organizer, Mr. Baptist had been homeless in this Philadelphia neighborhood. “We’re not just crying crocodile tears about poverty or singing ‘Kumbaya,’ ” he said. “We’re making contact with an organized section of the poor that’s doing something about poverty.”
The students visited neighborhoods where drugs are sold on street corners. They met a woman who described her experiences living in a tent city, including bathing her children in water from a hydrant. The woman is now on the staff at the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an organization started by poor people in the neighborhood to call attention to their plight.
For some of the students, it was their first close look at urban poverty. “I’ve done academic work on poverty, but here is a chance to meet poor people firsthand,” said Paul Gremier, 23, who said he might use his education to become a minister, a social worker or a professor.
On the ride back to New York, Ted Pardoe, a former Wall Street executive, said the trip had given him ideas about ways to work with the poor through not-for-profit agencies. “Yesterday I was skeptical about reality tours,” Mr. Pardoe said. “Now I’m not skeptical at all. Each person we met was more impressive than the one before.”
There was little discussion of God or church on the trip, but lots of talk about values and responsibility. Andrea Metcalfe, who is studying to become a Lutheran minister, said she was frustrated that the issue of poverty had received so little attention in all the recent talk about values and voting. Ms. Metcalfe blamed a reticence among liberals to connect their faith publicly with their actions.
“There’s this tendency for liberals to say, ‘We don’t want anything to do with mixing church and politics,’ ” Ms. Metcalfe said. As a result, she said, liberal Christians and their concerns have not entered the values debate.
Elizabeth Theoharis, a doctoral student and community activist who was leading the class with Mr. Baptist, challenged the students: “How do we move from the idea of poor people being sinners to poverty being a sin?”
That, she said, was a moral value, and the students agreed.
The rest of the article depicts how both evangelicals and liberals agree that fighting poverty is moral value. New York Times Free subscription required.
Tags: Poverty Analysis
