Category: Articles

Assessing the True Extent of Poverty in the Richest Nation on Earth

Tom Dispatch
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
October 27, 2022

Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.”

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Truthout
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
October 9, 2022

When the Biden administration announced its debt relief plan in late August, the timing was fitting. According to the Hebrew calendar, this last year, which ended on September 25, was the Shemitah year, a year where debts are forgiven. In the Bible, canceling debt is just one among a set of jubilee laws, which includes freeing the enslaved, feeding the poor, paying fair wages, and conserving and protecting overworked land.

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Mercy Makes Good Policy

Tom Dispatch
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
September 15, 2022

In the American ethos, sacrifice is often hailed as the chief ingredient for overcoming hardship and seizing opportunity. To be successful, we’re assured, college students must make personal sacrifices by going deep into debt for a future degree and the earnings that may come with it. Small business owners must sacrifice their paychecks so that their companies will continue to grow, while politicians must similarly sacrifice key policy promises to get something (almost anything!) done.

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Truthout
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
August 13, 2022

In 1922, the newspaper editor William Allen White wrote, “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.” On August 2, voters in Kansas proved him right, going to the polls for the first referendum on abortion since the fall of Roe v. Wade. The result was an emphatic rejection of a state constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislators to severely restrict access to abortion or ban the procedure outright. Pollsters were left scrambling as people across the country expressed surprise: How could this have happened in a state like Kansas?

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The moment is ripe for a different kind of popular movement that confronts divisive lies and builds broad coalitions for the common good.

Religion News Service
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II & Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
August 8, 2022

(RNS) — This summer’s made-for-TV Congressional hearings have outlined a seven-step plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Days of testimony have revealed astonishing details about the determination of former President Trump to subvert democracy.

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By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis & Diane Swords, Ph.D.
The Syracuse Post-Standard
August 5, 2022

This week marks the 77th anniversary of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many, nuclear war may feel like a relic of that terrible history and of a time of great power struggle and the Cold War arms race. But that is a delusion we can no longer afford to maintain. Today, the war in Ukraine, growing tension in the South China Sea (evidenced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit), and more are reminding us just how close we are to global catastrophe.

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How Dobbs Is an Attack on Us All

Tom Dispatch
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
July 19, 2022

When I was the age that my daughter is now, my favorite sweatshirt had the words “Choice, Choice, Choice, Choice” in rainbow letters across its front. My mom got me that sweatshirt at a 1989 rally in response to Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law restricting the use of state funds and facilities for abortion, an early attempt to eat away at Roe v. Wade.

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The Current US Supreme Court Is Not Constitutionally Legitimate. Dobbs is a watershed attack that will come to be known as an infamous consolidation of an unrelenting extremist assault on this country’s gains for equality and justice.

by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, and Shailly Gupta Barnes
June 25, 2022

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The First and Worst Hit by Pandemics of Every Sort

Tom Dispatch
By Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis
April 21, 2022

The 54th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., just passed. Dr. King was shot down while organizing low-wage sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

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The Washington Post
By The Rev. William J. Barber II and The Rev. Liz Theoharis 
April 5, 2022

In Hinds County, Miss., where nearly half of all residents are poor or low income, about 3 in 100 people have died of covid-19. Olivia Womack, a student at the University of Mississippi who grew up in Hinds County, has lost 20 members of her extended family to the coronavirus.

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