Amy L. Sherman

True Mercy and CharitySaving America:  Faith-based Services and the Future of Civil Societyby Robert Wuthnow  Princeton University Press. 352 pp. $29.95reviewed by Amy L. Sherman My heroine, Octavia Hill, chose to live in the slums of east London in the 1800s. Active in what would now be . . . . Continue Reading »

Renewing American Compassion: How Compassion for the Needy Can Turn Ordinary Citizens into Heroes By Marvin Olasky Free Press, 201 pages, $21 As I write this, I am unsettled by thoughts of a boy named Kenneth, a mom named Tina, and a monstrous bureaucracy called HUD. In Oak Ridge Gardens, a . . . . Continue Reading »

Several observers have pointed out the increasing gap in social and political attitudes and theological commitments between the leadership and the laity of the old-line/mainline churches. The average Episcopalian, Methodist, or Presbyterian in the pew, the studies show, tends to be more . . . . Continue Reading »

Earlier this year I was in charge of “debriefing” a small group of evangelical college students who had spent their spring break working with various agencies serving the homeless in inner-city Washington. Though they all had their own thoughts about what caused the poverty they had witnessed, . . . . Continue Reading »

With Liberty and Justice for Whom? The Recent Evangelical Debate Over Capitalism by Craig M. Gay, foreword by Peter L. Berger Eerdmans, 276 pages, $19.95 Recently the local news reported on a Wisconsin environmental initiative. School children were sent into prairie fields to gather seeds from the . . . . Continue Reading »

The 1980s may well be looked back upon as a decade of intellectual reformation in the so-called North-South debate. A burst of revisionist thinking has affected recent discussions of Third World economic development and may offer a harbinger of better policies vis-a-vis the world’s poor. There . . . . Continue Reading »