front cover of Faithful Finances 101
Faithful Finances 101
From the Poverty of Fear and Greed to the Riches of Spiritual Investing
Gary Moore
Templeton Press, 2005

Faithful Finances 101 is a first-person narrative by an outspoken advocate of faith-based investing. A senior vice president of investments at Paine Webber before founding his own investment firm as "counsel to ethical and spiritual investors," Gary Moore warns that much of the economic advice emanating from some popular and influential evangelical authors and speakers is based on scare tactics and distortions of what the Bible has to say about finances. He draws on fifty years of studying the Bible, politics, and economics and presents insights for those who want to be faithful in their finances—to use 100 percent of the time, talent, and treasure with which they have been entrusted for the glory of God as well as for the benefit of others and themselves, and not just give 10 percent of their incomes to the church.

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front cover of Fields of Desire
Fields of Desire
Poverty and Policy in Laos
Holly High
National University of Singapore Press, 2014
In this important new book, High argues that poverty reduction policies are formulated and implemented in fields of desire. Drawing on psychoanalytic understandings of desire, she shows that such programs circulate around the question of what is lacking. Far from rational responses to measures of need, then, the politics of poverty are unconscious, culturally expressed, mutually contradictory, and sometimes contrary to self-interest.


Based on long-term fieldwork in a Lao village that has been the subject of multiple poverty reduction and development programs, High’s account looks at implementation on the ground. While these efforts were laudable in their aims of reducing poverty, they often failed to achieve their objectives. Local people received them with suspicion and disillusionment. Nevertheless, poverty reduction policies continued to be renewed by planners and even desired locally. High relates this to the force of aspirations among rural Lao, ambivalent understandings of power and the “post-rebellious” moment in contemporary Laos.
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front cover of Freedom Is Not Enough
Freedom Is Not Enough
The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas
By William S. Clayson
University of Texas Press, 2010

Led by the Office of Economic Opportunity, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty reflected the president's belief that, just as the civil rights movement and federal law tore down legalized segregation, progressive government and grassroots activism could eradicate poverty in the United States. Yet few have attempted to evaluate the relationship between the OEO and the freedom struggles of the 1960s. Focusing on the unique situation presented by Texas, Freedom Is Not Enough examines how the War on Poverty manifested itself in a state marked by racial division and diversity—and by endemic poverty.

Though the War on Poverty did not eradicate destitution in the United States, the history of the effort provides a unique window to examine the politics of race and social justice in the 1960s. William S. Clayson traces the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State against a backdrop of dissent among Chicano militants and black nationalists who rejected Johnson's brand of liberalism. The conservative backlash that followed is another result of the dramatic political shifts revealed in the history of the OEO, completing this study of a unique facet in Texas's historical identity.

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front cover of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
Elizabeth Hinton
Harvard University Press, 2016

Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year

In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

“An extraordinary and important new book.”
—Jill Lepore, New Yorker

“Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.”
—Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review

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front cover of The Fundamental Institution
The Fundamental Institution
Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor Farms
Megan Birk
University of Illinois Press, 2022
By the early 1900s, the poor farm had become a ubiquitous part of America's social welfare system. Megan Birk's history of this foundational but forgotten institution focuses on the connection between agriculture, provisions for the disadvantaged, and the daily realities of life at poor farms. Conceived as an inexpensive way to provide care for the indigent, poor farms in fact attracted wards that ranged from abused wives and the elderly to orphans, the disabled, and disaster victims. Most people arrived unable rather than unwilling to work, some because of physical problems, others due to a lack of skills or because a changing labor market had left them behind. Birk blends the personal stories of participants with institutional histories to reveal a loose-knit system that provided a measure of care to everyone without an overarching philosophy of reform or rehabilitation.

In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution offers an overdue portrait of rural social welfare in the United States.

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