OPINION: A movement of Lilliputians

I believe that it was at the Pax Christi USA National Assembly in Cleveland in 1996 when scripture scholar and teacher Ched Myers invoked the story of Gulliver and the Lilliputians (from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift) to describe the task that is before the peace movement. For those unfamiliar with the story, Gulliver, the [...]

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OPINION: Depression and Depression

One facet of our “new economic reality” (what will it be called someday – the Great Collapse?) that warrants some thinking about is the emotional/spiritual side of this kind of loss. It’s been less than six months since the market took its historic plunge and the bailouts began, and most of us have been in [...]

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OPINION: Our favorite Catholic Worker newspaper

Many folks don’t know that the first “Catholic Worker” was a newspaper–NOT a house of hospitality. From the very beginning, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were consistent (maybe insistent) in the belief that a newspaper was an important, even essential part of the Catholic Worker movement.
We make no secret of our great admiration of the [...]

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OPINION: When your car becomes your home

Earlier this week, I walked out the front door of Jubilee House to find a police car’s lights flashing. The police officer was looking at a truck that is often parked in one of the parallel spots on our street. It belongs to a homeless friend, who more or less lives out of the truck, and [...]

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OPINION: Hope, yes; but real change is still up to us

After watching the movie The Great Debaters with some folks waiting to take showers at the house this afternoon, one of the guests remarked:
“My mother is white and my father is African-American.  I’m kind of like Obama!”
This, if anything, gives me hope. Change doesn’t come from the top, and no politician or administration is going to begin [...]

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OPINION:Twenty Questions – Social Justice Quiz 2008

by Bill Quigley – Human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University, New Orleans
In its 2007 Annual Homeless Report to Congress, HUD reported that nearly one in four people in homeless shelters are children 17 or younger. Bill Quigley’s “Social Justice Quiz 2008″ challenges us to look through the eyes of those less fortunate [...]

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OPINION: “Dorothy Day’s Day”

Here’s a great article that win this week’s copy of The Nation. It’s by Coleman McCarthy:
At Dorothy Day’s death in November 1980, at 83, talk was heard that
the Catholic Worker, the movement she co-founded in 1933, would vanish
without her. She was its Earth Mother–or better, its Reverend Mother,
a convert to Catholicism who took literally the [...]

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OPINION: What’s Wrong with Jeremiah Wright?

Now that a little of the furor over the sound bites from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and his recent interviews has died down, I can’t help wondering what’s wrong with Wright.  Some of his more inflammatory assertions – that the U.S. government could have introduced the HIV/AIDS virus and drugs into the black community, that we are [...]

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OPINION: Addiction Heartache

 It’s no secret that a lot of homeless folks are addicted to either drugs or alcohol.  The ways they got there are as various as anyone else’s.  But the toll has been higher; it’s left them high and dry, wasted, alone, and needing another hit.  Badly.
It’s easy to judge, especially for those of us whose addictions [...]

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OPINION: City May Try to Restrict Churches from Serving the Poor

As many of you know, issues around providing care to homeless people in our community are being brought constantly to the city commission. St. Francis House, our local homeless shelter, received flack for years about the “undesirables” that were attracted downtown because they were offered help there. Restrictions were enforced, and SFH began limiting the [...]

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