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 Who Will Provide? The Changing Role Of Religion In American Social Welfareby Brent Coffin, Mary Jo BaneDec 12, 2000
DescriptionWho will provide for America’s children, elderly, and working families? Not since the 1930s has our nation faced such fundamental choices over how to care for all its citizens. Now, amid economic prosperity, Americans are asking what government, business, and nonprofit organizations can and can’t do—and what they should and shouldn’t be asked to do. As both political parties look to faith-based organizations to meet material and spiritual needs, the center of this historic debate is the changing role of religion. These essays combine a fresh perspective and detailed analysis on these pressing issues. They emerge from a three-year Harvard Seminar sponsored by the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life that brought together scholars in public policy, government, religion, sociology, law, education, and nonprofit leadership. By putting the present moment in broad historical perspective, these essays offer rich insights into the resources of faith-based organizations, while cautioning against viewing their expanded role as an alternative to the government’s responsibility. In Who Will Provide? community leaders, organizational managers, public officials, and scholars will find careful analysis drawing on a number of fields to aid their work of devising better partnerships of social provision locally and nationally. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001. Reviews”…engaging and especially timely.” ”In a political season in which both major parties call for a deeper partnership between church and state to address issues of social welfare, nothing could be more timely than this thoughtful collection, itself the fruit of a partnership among diverse disciplinary and religious traditions. The authors speak as prophets, demanding social justice, and as scholars, sensitive to the complexities of religion and politics in our pluralist society. Let us hope that America's citizens and leaders attend to the voices in this volume.” “Our nation finds itself in the midst of an unexpected vigorous public discussion about what happens to those in need now that ‘welfare as we know it’ is gone. Much of that discussion however is historically ill-informed and philosophically thin. [Who Will Provide?] supplies the necessary ingredients to enrich and deepen the debate, and to give it focus.” "A progressive politics can succeed only if citizens consider even the poorest an integral part of "us." These essays demonstrate that in the U.S., faith-based communities and values have helped build that "us" across the lines of locality and state, class, and occasionally even race. They also address with insight the current promises and perils of bringing religion into a tighter relation with the state. If this book succeeds in its startling aim of reclaiming religious values from the grip of the Religious Right and the disdain of the Secular Left, it will have a major, salutary effect on the politics of the twenty-first century." Selling TerritoryWorld |
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