Poverty and Race

Fourth Quarter 1999

Two new essays by staff members of the Center for Public Justice have just appeared. Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America, edited by Gary Orfield and Holly Lebowitz Rossi (New York: Century Foundation), includes James Skillen's "Evangelical Cooperation in the Cause of Racial Justice."

Stanley Carlson-Thies' "Faith-Based Institutions Cooperating with Public Welfare: The Promise of the Charitable Choice Provision," appears in Welfare Reform and Faith-Based Organizations, edited by Derek Davis and Barry Hankins (Waco, TX: J.W. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies). Also featured in this book are essays by Ronald J. Sider and Heidi Rolland Unruh, Carl H. Esbeck, and Jim Wallis.

The volume on religion and race is the fruit of a project on civil rights at Harvard University that took up the question of how the civil rights movement has changed since the 1960s. More particularly, the question behind the book is why the coalition of religious groups that fought for civil rights in the sixties no longer holds together. Skillen's essay not only tries to explain why the cause of racial justice today is more complex than before but also makes a case for the kind of contribution evangelical Christians should be making today to public justice for all races. Other essays—from a wide range of perspectives—look back at the civil rights tradition and ahead to an even more diversified American social and political context.

Welfare Reform and Faith-Based Organizations comes from a conference hosted at Baylor University in April, 1998. The book represents the debate between those who favor government's cooperation with, and equal treatment of, religious social service agencies and those who oppose such cooperation because they believe that religion is an excluded category of public life. Whereas co-editor Derek Davis believes that Charitable Choice represents the "right motive" but the "wrong method," Carlson-Thies argues that this significant welfare provision is the right way for government to encourage the right kind of service without either privileging or discriminating against religious providers.