The Claims Of Poverty

Crasson examines the status of poverty in late medieval England as both a sacred imitation of Christ and a social stigma.

In Rethinking Poverty, James P. Bailey argues that most contemporary policies aimed at reducing poverty in the United States are flawed because they focus solely on insufficient income. Bailey argues that traditional policies such as minimum wage laws, food stamps, housing subsidies, earned income tax credits, and other forms of cash and non-cash income supports need to be complemented by efforts that enable the poor to save and accumulate assets. Drawing on Michael Sherraden’s work on asset building and scholarship by Melvin Oliver, Thomas Shapiro, and Dalton Conley on asset discrimination, Bailey presents us with a novel and promising way forward to combat persistent and morally unacceptable poverty in the United States and around the world. Rethinking Poverty makes use of a significant body of Catholic social teachings in its argument for an asset development strategy to reduce poverty. These Catholic teachings include, among others, principles of human dignity, the social nature of the person, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. These principles and the related social analyses have not yet been brought to bear on the idea of asset-building for the poor by those working within the Catholic social justice tradition. This book redresses this shortcoming, and further, claims that a Catholic moral argument for asset-building for the poor can be complemented and enriched by Martha Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach.” This book will affect current debates and practical ways to reduce poverty, as well as the future direction of Catholic social teaching.

Presents fifteen essays by academics about the severe poverty that afflicts billions of human lives. These essays seek to explain why freedom from poverty is a human right and what duties this right creates for the affluent.

The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture. What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben’s new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon of Western monasticism from Pachomius to St. Francis. The Highest Poverty meticulously reconstructs the lives of monks, with their obsessive attention to temporal articulation and to the Rule, to ascetic techniques and to liturgy. But Agamben’s thesis is that the true novelty of monasticism lies not in the confusion between life and norm, but in the discovery of a new dimension, in which “life” is affirmed in its autonomy, and in which the claim of the “highest poverty” and “use” challenges the law in ways that we must still grapple with today. How can we think a form-of-life, that is, a human life released from the grip of law, and a use of bodies and of the world that never becomes an appropriation? How can we think life as something not subject to ownership but only for common use?

Encountering Poverty challenges mainstream frameworks of global poverty by going beyond the claims that poverty is a problem that can be solved through economic resources or technological interventions. By focusing on the power and privilege that underpin persistent impoverishment and using tools of critical analysis and pedagogy, the authors explore the opportunities for and limits of poverty action in the current moment. Encountering Poverty invites students, educators, activists, and development professionals to think about and act against inequality by foregrounding, rather than sidestepping, the long history of development and the ethical dilemmas of poverty action today.

The Many Meanings of Poverty is about poverty in a colonial context—it argues that the cultural meanings of poverty defined social compacts that served to bolster and undermine the sources of colonialism.

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and human environments. Poverty also goes against the core values of democratic societies. Lotter talks about poverty in ways that depict this devastating human condition clearly. He shows why inequalities associated with poverty require our serious moral concern.