Poverty/Income Inequality

[1] Poverty entraps people by ensnaring and entangling them in intricate and inescapable webs of slavery. I use “slavery” not as a metaphor, but as an apt description of what life is like for between twelve and twenty-seven million people today.1 That there are more slaves today than at any other time in history should […]

[1] The poor are “living images of God,” wrote Martin Luther in 1522, an opinion shared by Ulrich Zwingli, who argued that God “turned all visible cults from himself to the poor.”1 Both reformers knew Johannes Oecolampadius (a co-signatory at Marburg in 1529), whose treatises on poor relief began with his 1519 translation of Gregory […]

[1] One billion human beings are hungry today. One billion people do not have enough to eat. The number alone is staggering. But what makes it scandalous is the fact that God’s abundant creation — the fertile earth and seas — can produce adequate nutrition for all. Scarcity is not the problem. The problems (and […]

[1] Rigorous self-discipline is somewhat alien to contemporary American religiosity. Perhaps on account of cultural affinities, or an unspoken assumption that the soul is not affected by the body and its experiences, the very obvious benefits of diligent practice do not seem so obvious to us. I have often witnessed this aversion to rigor as […]

[1] It might take the worst financial crisis in eighty years, but it seems that the message is finally sinking in: markets are not moral. However, it is unfortunate that such a realization is needed at all. Characterization of the “the market’s” actions or changing moods may just be just figures of speech, but this […]

[1] The unemployment rate—the fraction of adults currently working for pay among those who are either working or actively looking for a job the nation’s labor force that is unable to find work—was officially measured at 7.6 percent in January of 2009 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the federal agency tasked with measuring […]

Samuel Torvend. Luther and the Hungry Poor: Gathered Fragments (Fortress Press, 2008). 978-0-8006-6238-7. [1] With the negative externalities of globalization ever more present in the United States due to the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and its effects on the United States banking and finance infrastructure and individual lives affected, social ministry is more relevant than ever. […]

[1] Luther has always been a difficult read, as Martin Marty has informed us.[1] His worldview changed repeatedly. It follows that his writings are filled with contradictions and paradoxes.[2] Samuel Torvend appears to have missed the counsel of Benne, Marty and Edwards for he sees Luther as a whole intellect from the pounding on the […]

[1] It was at the 11 o’clock Eucharist on a recent Sunday. The presiding minister was in the middle of the Great Thanksgiving. “In the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord Jesus took bread and gave thanks,” he read taking the host in his hand for us all to see. “This is my […]

A New Deal for the Global Economy The Current Crisis “Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s (sic) greatest source of joy. And it ranks with death as his greatest source of anxiety.”[1] [1] The current global crisis began as a crisis about money but quickly became a pandemic global economic […]