Category: Articles

In This Kairos Time, Will We Embody Church?

Sojourners
By Kelly Brown Douglas & Liz Theoharis
March 26, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an ongoing crisis that has long been ignored — endemic injustice and growing inequality.

This current health crisis has called faith communities to account. On our watch, poverty has reached epidemic proportions; children are being neglected, the homeless are ignored, and immigrants are dehumanized.

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The Revival of the National Union of the Homeless

The Nation
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
March 20, 2020

The experiences and organizing efforts of the homeless can teach us all about taking action together in this unprecedented time.


Early last week, Americans woke to news of the largest one day oil price drop in history. Since then, stocks on Wall Street have continued to plummet and the Fed has materialized, overnight, $1.5 trillion for investors.

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Plagues Expose the Foundations of Injustice

Sojourners
By Liz Theoharis
March 18, 2020

As the current public health emergency deepens, it is revealing and worsening broader economic and social emergencies that we have been confronted with for many years. These are emergencies caused by the lack of health care, affordable housing, living wages, labor rights, voting rights, and environmental protection, by war, police violence, the criminal justice system, and policy violence of all kinds.

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cnn

Poverty is a Winning Issue for 2020

CNN
by William J. Barber and Liz Theoharis
February 17, 2020

As the primaries turn towards Nevada and South Carolina, there is ongoing discussion about how voter turnout impacted the outcome in New Hampshire. To understand voter participation in 2020, we need to go back and take a look at what happened in 2016.That year was the first election without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.

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Boston Review

A Campaign for the Heart and Soul of our Democracy

By William J Barber II and Liz Theoharis
The Hill
June 16, 2019

With President Trump’s official announcement of his 2020 campaign scheduled for June 18 and dozens of Democratic candidates running for their party’s nomination, the next 18 months promise a level of political campaigning that will exhaust even the most engaged voters. But another campaign cycle that simply engages the normal political fault lines of left versus right cannot address the moral and economic crisis of the present moment. 

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Trump wants to give 62 cents of every dollar to the military. That’s immoral

The Guardian
Reverend William Barber, Dr Liz Theoharis and Lindsay Koshgarian
March 27, 2019

Donald Trump recently unleashed his dark vision for our nation and our world, in the form of his budget request to Congress.

A budget shows our values more clearly than any tweet, campaign speech or political slogan. It’s what marries detailed, dollar-and-cents policy decisions to deeper political – and moral – priorities.

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America faces many emergencies. The ‘border crisis’ isn’t one of them

In today’s America, the real emergency is that a quarter of a million people die from poverty each year

The Guardian
Reverend William Barber and Dr Liz Theoharis
February 25, 2019

In declaring a national emergency to fund an unnecessary border wall this month, Donald Trump has provoked a conversation about what the word “emergency” actually means.

Forget the manufactured border crisis, let’s talk about the real emergencies facing the nation today. Right now in America, there are 140 million people living in poverty or just one paycheck or emergency away from poverty. Thirty-seven million people live without healthcare and 62 million are paid less than a living wage. Fourteen million families cannot afford water and millions are living with poisoned water and without sanitation services. We suffer under an impoverished democracy that has less voting rights today than it did after the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

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