THE POOR WILL ALWAYS BE WITH US??!!! – What Jesus Really Said About the Poor – a talk with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis [LDT088]

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How many times have you heard someone try to stand in the way of work to end poverty by saying, “The poor will always be with us”? It’s as if they are saying that God wants a certain percentage of us to be living in poverty. We have heard quite a bit of this in the last few months, over the Trump budget proposal, and the various versions of trump’s healthcare (or maybe we should call it “Wealthcare” proposals.

Our guest today is the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. Dr. Theoharis is the co-director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, which is a part of Union Theological Seminary in New York. She is also the co-chair, with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, which is reviving Dr. Martin Luther King’s Poor Peoples’ Campaing, and picking up where he left off fifty years ago. Her twenty-five year of activism, fighting poverty and homelessness, have brought her into contact with that difficult portion of scripture many, many times.

Her new book, Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, is partly a very detailed and enlightening Bible study, and partly a call to Christians to take seriously Jesus’ “good news to the poor.”