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 called “Christian community development,” with an emphasis on affordable housing, Hill was a frequent speaker to churches and charitable societies, and she sometimes rebuked her . . . . 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 »