It was a hot afternoon in July 2020, five months after the first stay-at-home orders issued in New Jersey had forced residents to shelter in place. Cherry Oakley, moderator of the Presbytery of New Brunswick, was thinking hard in the front seat of her car. She lamented the racial and economic injustice laid bare by the pandemic.
The co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign delivered this post-election message during an online event Thursday: Now that voters have turned out in record numbers to cast their ballot, the real work of advocating and caring for the 140 million Americans who are poor and low income must begin in earnest, no matter who sits in the Oval Office or walks the halls of Congress and the nation’s 50 statehouses.
To many United States citizens, voting has been a fairly easy proposition. They take some time on Election Day to go to a polling place near their home, maybe stand in line for a while, cast their vote and get a sticker.
Fourteen months ago, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was on a bus winding through Western Kentucky on the Poor People’s Campaign’s Real National Emergency bus tour and envisioning a major march of tens of thousands of people in June 2020.
Remembering “the least of these” takes on greater significance during the coronavirus pandemic.
With many Americans losing the ability to work, school being canceled for millions of children, and child-care centers being shuttered in many places, the challenges of people already living on or near the edge of society become magnified.
Dr. Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker, historian and the Ira A. Lipton Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, concluded a lecture before an audience at the University of Louisville Wednesday with a personal story that may say as much about race relations in the U.S. as the hour-long lecture that preceded his story.
What’s the use of the Social Creed for the 21st Century? Yes, the Social Creed gets cited in books that deal with ecumenical social ethics, but how many read those after they leave seminary? Well, actually, Cynthia Rigby’s book “Promotion of Social Righteousness” (2010) did get broader circulation, and it reprints the Social Creed as the key illustration of what the church stands for in its social witness. Her title is one of the six “Great Ends of the Church” and it means both social justice and public integrity.
Leaders from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Racial & Intercultural Justice ministry and Office of Public Witness participated in a Monday morning announcement by The Poor People’s Campaign that it will be embarking on a National Emergency Poverty and Truth Bus Tour in the coming months.
With issues such as racism, gender equality, LGBTQ rights, immigration, national security and more roiling the United States, the nation finds itself in one of its most turbulent political and social eras since the Civil Rights movement.
