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Leading scholars examine how the church, community organizations, and the government must work together to provide for America's poor in the aftermath of welfare reform. . Who will provide for Americas children, elderly, and working families? Not since the 1930s has our nation faced such fundamental choices over how to care for all its citizens. Now, amid economic prosperity, Americans are asking what government, business, and non-profit organizations can and can’t do and what they should and shouldn’t be asked to do. As both political parties look to faith-based organizations to meet material and spiritual needs, the center of this historic debate is the changing role of religion. These essays combine a fresh perspective and detailed analysis on these pressing issues. They emerge from a three-year Harvard Seminar sponsored by the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life that brought together scholars in public policy, government, religion, sociology, law, education, and non-profit leadership. By putting the present moment in broad historical perspective, these essays offer rich insights into the resources of faith-based organizations, while cautioning against viewing their expanded role as an alternative to the government’s responsibility. In Who Will Provide? community leaders, organizational managers, public officials, and scholars will find careful analysis drawing on a number of fields to aid their work of devising better partnerships of social provision locally and nationally. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001..
In Who Will Provide? community leaders, organizational managers, public officials, and scholars will find careful analysis drawing on a number of fields to aid their work of devising better partnerships of social provision locally and nationally.
This volume seeks to understand the role and function of religious-based organizations in strengthening associational life through the provision of social services, thereby legitimizing a new role for faith in the formerly secular public sphere. Specifically, we explore how a church in a postcommunist setting, during periods of economic growth and recession in the wake of transitions to capitalism, and with varied numbers of adherents, might contribute to welfare services in a new political regime with freedom of religion. Put another way, what new pressures would be placed on the secular welfare state if religious organizations (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, others) simply stopped offering their services? By examining public perceptions of the church, changing dynamics of religiosity, and church-state-civil society relations, the volume places these issues in context.
Study of social welfare work in the churches, from earliest Christian times to the present, and its relationship to that of secular social agencies, presented under auspices of the Methodist Board of Economic Welfare.
Congregations and faith-based organizations have become key participants in America’s welfare revolution. Recent legislation has expanded the social welfare role of religious communities, thus revealing a pervasive lack of faith in purely economic responses to poverty. Charitable Choices is an ethnographic study of faith-based poverty relief in 30 congregations in the rural south. Drawing on in-depth interviews and fieldwork in Mississippi faith communities, it examines how religious conviction and racial dynamics shape congregational benevolence. Mississippi has long had the nation's highest poverty rate and was the first state to implement a faith-based welfare reform initiative. The book provides a grounded and even-handed treatment of congregational poverty relief rather than abstract theory on faith-based initiatives. The volume examines how congregations are coping with national developments in social welfare policy and reveals the strategies that religious communities utilize to fight poverty in their local communities. By giving particular attention to the influence of theological convictions and organizational dynamics on religious service provision, it identifies both the prospects and pitfalls likely to result from the expansion of charitable choice.
Religion, Welfare, and Social Service Provision: Common Ground delves deeply into the partnerships forged between religious communities, government agencies and nonprofits to deliver social services to the needy. These pages offer a considered examination of how local faith entities have served those in their midst, and how the provision of those services has been impacted by evolving social policies. This foundational volume brings together the work of more than two dozen leading researchers, each providing long overdue scholarly inquiry into religiously affiliated helping and the many possibilities that it holds for effective cooperation.
The Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America is a unique reference work that provides readers with basic information about the history of social welfare in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The intent of the encyclopedia is to provide readers with information about how these three nations have dealt with social welfare issues, some similar across borders, others unique, as well as to describe important events, developments, and the lives and work of some key contributors to social welfare developments. In choosing a continental focus, editors John M. Herrick and Paul H. Stuart encourage readers to explore cross-national and comparative work in the development of social welfare history. The Encyclopedia defines social welfare broadly to include education, informal mutual assistance, the development of the social work profession, and voluntary charitable activities as well as state supported public welfare activities. The coverage is therefore broad and interdisciplinary, including the fields of anthropology, health sciences, history, political science, social work, and sociology. Editors include specialists in the social welfare history of each nation, and they have collaborated with scholars from a variety of academic disciplines to prepare entries of varying length addressing these issues. Associate editors for Canada and Mexico, both authorities in the history of social welfare in those countries, were responsible for recruiting expert contributors in their fields. No other reference work takes this unique continental approach, and as such this will be a much needed acquisition for any academic or large public library with a social science collection. Beginning students as well as established scholars will find this an invaluable starting point for investigations into new areas of inquiry. Topics Covered • Canada • Charity • Child welfare • Economic conditions and social welfare • Economics/tax policy • Health/Mental Health Policy • Landmark social welfare legislation • Mexico • Poverty • Race and Social Inequality • Social Problems • Social Security and Income Maintenance • Social Welfare Reform • Social Welfare Reformers • Social Work • United States • Women and social welfare Associate Editors John Graham, University of Calgary Enrique Ochoa, California State University, Los Angeles Ruth Britton, University of Southern California Editorial Assistants Russell Bennett and Benson Chisanga, University of Alabama
Social scientists sometimes seem not to know what to do with religion. In the first century of sociology's history as a discipline, the reigning concern was explaining the emergence of the modern world, and that brought with it an expectation that religion would simply fade from the scene as societies became diverse, complex, and enlightened. As the century approached its end, however, a variety of global phenomena remained dramatically unexplained by these theories. Among the leading contenders for explanatory power to emerge at this time were rational choice theories of religious behavior. Researchers who have spent time in the field observing religious groups and interviewing practitioners, however, have questioned the sufficiency of these market models. Studies abound that describe thriving religious phenomena that fit neither the old secularization paradigm nor the equations predicting vitality only among organizational entrepreneurs with strict orthodoxies. In this collection of previously unpublished essays, scholars who have been immersed in field research in a wide variety of settings draw on those observations from the field to begin to develop more helpful ways to study religion in modern lives. The authors examine how religion functions on the ground in a pluralistic society, how it is experienced by individuals, and how it is expressed in social institutions. Taken as a whole, these essays point to a new approach to the study of religion, one that emphasizes individual experience and social context over strict categorization and data collection.
Presents lively, research-based essays by premier social scientists on the positive and negative roles of religious groups in American public life.