Good news: William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

Barber and Theoharis met in 2013, at the opening of the Kairos Center, where he was one of the speakers. (The center advocates a grassroots approach to ending poverty, in which poor people are the key elements of leadership.) At the time, he was launching his Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, enlisting a broad-based alliance of Christians, Muslims, Jews, nonbelievers, blacks, Latinos, poor whites, feminists, environmentalists, and others to protest the conservative agenda of the state legislature. Theoharis, an ordained Presbyterian minister, had spent twenty-five years doing organizing and social-justice work among domestic workers and Native Americans, and advocating for the rights of the homeless. The new project is called the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. This time, the demands include federal and state living-wage laws, equity in education, an end to mass incarceration, a single-payer health-care system, and the protection of the right to vote.

To read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/william-barber-takes-on-poverty-and-race-in-the-age-of-trump

[S.E. TN Liberal]

1. Rev. William Barber and his "Moral Monday" movement in North Carolina are examples...

...all Democrats should know about and support.

[guillaumeb]

3. Agreed.

Like the Reverend King Jr. before him, Barber is a tremendous voice for progressive politics.

[yallerdawg]

2. "He's the real thing." - Senator Elizabeth Warren

Barber’s career has veered between the political and the religious, but the two paths often intersect: he argues politics from a theological perspective, while his sermons are informed by the lessons of the streets. When he mentions “the good book,” he is as likely to be referring to Howard Zinn’s progressive primer “A People’s History of the United States” as he is to the one that contains the Old and New Testaments. He learned both traditions at home.

[guillaumeb]

4. And, as his title shows, he is a theist.

Which is almost like a non-theist according to someone.

[Voltaire2]

5. What's the matter gill? Nobody showed up to break your

idiotic commandment so you had to poof up a dispute on your own?

[Mariana]

6. He's usually not quite this obvious.

Are you all right, Gil? You seem to be off your game. Did you have a few extra glasses of wine this afternoon, perhaps?