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Writings about Poverty and Justice
Speeches (Remember there's a fair amount of repetition between speeches)  

 

Medicine As If Justice Mattered
This the basic talk that I then tailor when speaking to medical students about the issues of poverty and justice. I recount my own history and immersion in inner-city injustice and then ask why we might want to work for justice and how we might do so.

Compassion and Justice is a talk I gave in June 2007 at the 17th anniversary of the founding of Joseph's House where we presented the first annual compassion and justice awards.

A Mission to Eradicate Poverty is a speech to students at Princeton University in the autumn of 2005, recounting both my history as a “poverty doctor” in inner-city Washington but also looking at the structures that perpetuate poverty in our country. It wouldn’t be difficult to eradicate if we only had a small degree of political will.

In a Time of Scarce Resources is a talk I gave at the Hiram College Summer Seminar on global injustice in the spring of 2006 about health and health care inequalities in the United States and their direct relationship to justice. In it I also summarize the history of the black inner-city ghetto from my book Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.

 
Articles

 

 
 

The High Price of American Inequality (March 2008) looks at the growing economic inequality in the United States, which is greater than in any other developed country. The impact of this inequality on our country is important, yet policy makers don't seem to consider it significant. What's causing it? What can we do about it?

Justice and the Limits of Charity is a 2001 article from The Other Side exploring the tension between charity and justice. Out of my years of working with individuals within a faith community that has many ministries to the poor, I began wondering about the side effects of our charity. Both charity and justice are necessary, but it’s important to know about the ways our charity might work against justice if we hope to ameliorate that impact.

Stupid Deaths is a review of Dr Paul Farmer’s book, Pathologies of Power, that appeared in Health (Vol. 9, No. 3, 403-416 2005) in which Farmer examines the violence structured into the very structures of our society. Using as examples his visits to a tuberculosis epidemic in Russian prisons and his own work with AIDS in Haiti, Farmer guides us clearly through the terrain and gives us some sense of how we should begin.

Still Separate, Still Unequal is a brief editorial written for May 2004 issue Sojourners magazine upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs Topeka Board of Education.