Articles & Interviews
Women like Claire McClinton, Johnnie Tillmon, and Julia Ward Howe have allowed us glimpses of what a country that served and empowered all women looks like.
Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis
May 13, 2021
One hundred and fifty years ago, in the bloody wake of the Civil War, the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe issued a “Mother’s Day Proclamation.” The world, she wrote, could no longer bear such terrible violence and death. She called on women across the country to “rise up through the ashes and devastation” and come together in the cause of peace. Forty years later, her daughter Anna Jarvis created Mother’s Day.
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Biden can’t fight inequality without debt cancellation.
Slate
By Liz Theoharis and Astra Taylor
April 6, 2021
As a devastating pandemic raged, America’s billionaires amassed an additional $1.3 trillion in wealth over the last year, while millions of regular people lost their jobs, health insurance, and homes. The most vulnerable among us have been hardest hit and are, research shows, the least able to recover.
The passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is a welcome development. President Joe Biden, one headline proclaimed, has “launched the second war on poverty.” That’s certainly what this country needs.
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Pro-austerity and anti-poor economic policies, along with over-militarization, have kept America in a death spiral for the past half-century.
Tom Dispatch
By Liz Theoharis
April 5, 2021
Fifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous “Beyond Vietnam” sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined by aggression hurt the poor and dispossessed across the planet.
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The Byrd rule is not in the Constitution. It’s not what you swore to uphold.
The Nation
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
March 2, 2021
In the biblical story of Queen Esther, a daughter of the exiled Hebrew people rose to power in the society of her day. When the survival of her people became a political issue before the King, Queen Esther’s Uncle Mordecai wrote on behalf of their marginalized community to suggest that God may have placed her in the position she was in for such a time as this. Queen Esther rose to the challenge and risked her position to save her people.
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A biblical look at the crisis of poverty today.
Sojourners
by Liz Theoharis
March 2021 Cover Story
Since I began to help organize a movement to end poverty, people have said to me that our goals are too ambitious—that demands for human rights and human dignity are both politically inconceivable and impossibly expensive. They quote the Bible, arguing that since Jesus said, “the poor will be with you always,” it can’t be God’s will for everyone to share in the abundance of our world.
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Not Those of Poor Americans, That’s For Sure
Tom Dispatch
by Liz Theoharis
February 16, 2021
In June 1990, future South African President Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress only months after being released from 27 years in a South African apartheid prison. He reminded the political leadership of the United States that “to deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity. To impose on them a wretched life of hunger and deprivation is to dehumanise them.”
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