Something is stirring in the religious world [View all]

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President Obama addresses the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty in Washington on Tuesday. (Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

May 13 at 8:18 PM
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Opinion writer

Will we regard poverty as a haunting national problem, or will the focus groups continue to tell politicians of all stripes to talk only about the middle class because mentioning the poor is politically toxic?

Might the condition of low-income Americans galvanize religious people to see alleviating poverty and righting social injustice as moral issues? The habit in political writing when discussing “moral issues” is to refer only to abortion or gay marriage. But what implicates morality more than the way we, as a society and as individuals, treat those who are cut off from the ladders of advancement and the treasures of prosperity?

And can we find a way of thinking constructively about the role of family breakup in setting back the life chances of poor kids while still recognizing that family life itself is being battered by rising economic inequality, the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs, racism and mass incarceration?

These are some of the questions I am left with after moderating a discussion about poverty at Georgetown University this week. For all the obvious journalistic reasons, it’s not my habit to write about events in which I participate. But this particular panel was a bit different from the usual policy talkfest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/something-is-stirring-in-the-religious-world/2015/05/13/02452c6c-f9a4-11e4-9030-b4732caefe81_story.html

https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/righton/2015/05/08/overcoming-poverty-catholic-evangelical-leadership-summit-at-georgetown-university-may-11/