Liz Theoharis

Books

You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty

by The Rev. Dr Liz Theoharis & Noam Sandweiss-Back

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, one of the nation’s leading anti-poverty organizers and moral voices, and her co-author, Noam Sandweiss-Back, argue it is possible to abolish poverty. But this won’t happen through the goodwill of the powerful or the charitable actions of well-meaning people alone. It will happen through a mass movement, open to all, and led by the poor themselves.

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We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor

Edited by Liz Theoharis and Charon Hribar

Broadleaf Press, September 9, 2025 (available for pre-order now)

A book of prayers, rituals, and liturgies that grows out of communities committed to abolishing poverty.

Prayer has long sustained movements for social change. Ritual gives shape to our desire for justice, and liturgy lends power to our work. In We Pray Freedom, we learn from activists and movement builders the songs, stories, and ritual practices that keep them going for the long haul.

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Articles & Interviews

Woe to You Who Deprive the Poor of Their Rights

A Battle of Theologies in the Age of Trump

Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis
March 2, 2025

“There has almost always been an outright hostility that is shown towards people of the Christian faith,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on a podcast recently. He was talking with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana lawmaker and president of the Family Research Council, about freedom of religion and the actions of the second Trump administration.

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Toward a Better World

Building a Movement for Social Justice in a Time of Peril

Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis & William D. Hartung
January 23, 2025

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line.

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A Third Reconstruction Based on Moral Values Like a Living Wage and Health Care

Background Briefing with Ian Masters
November 27, 2024

“With 66 million million poor folks who are white and 30 million low-wage Americans not voting in the recent election, we discuss a strategy for a Third Reconstruction based on moral values like a living wage and health care and speak with the Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis, Co-Chair with Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. She is the Co-Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and has spent the past two decades organizing amongst the poor in the United States.

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Lifting from the Bottom

How to Survive Donald Trump’s America

Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis & Shailly Gupta Barnes
November 24, 2024

“If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)

Before November 5th, millions of us were already struggling with poverty, extreme storms, immigration nightmares, anti-trans bills, criminalized reproductive health, the demolition of homeless encampments, the silencing of freedom of speech on campuses… and, of course, the list only goes on and on.

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Billionaires Are Not Going to Save Us

Looking for Hope in Hard Places and Hard Times

Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis
October 17, 2024

It was William Shakespeare who, in Troilus and Cressida, wrote, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” And yet, in the polarized news cycle since Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States and the hurricanes have kept coming, we’ve heard a tale not of shared humanity, but of ruin, discord, and political polarization.

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Where Can We Live?

The Homeless Crisis in America

Tom Dispatch
By Cedar Monroe and Liz Theoharis
September 8, 2024

In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.

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About the Author

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is a theologian, pastor, author, and anti-poverty activist. She is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Rev. Dr. Theoharis has been organizing in poor and low-income communities for the past 30 years. Her books include: You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025), We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor (Broadleaf Press, 2025) and Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and she has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, Sojourners and elsewhere. Rev. Dr. Theoharis is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary. She has been awarded the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum, the Selma Bridge Award, the Women of Spirit Award from the Presbyterian Church (USA) and many others.