Ebook: Who Will Provide?: The Changing Role of Religion in American Social Welfare

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. Not since the 1930s was the question posed by the 1996 welfare reform law so dramatically restated: Who in this new, post welfare-state era is responsible for social provision? This legislation up-ended our familiar notions of government and charity. Emerging from The Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, the essays in Who Will Provide? address several important aspects of this challenging situation. They trace the long history of American social programs, voluntary associations, and religious organizations. They explore the need for a new kind of public religion that faces the plurality of America today. They focus on social action as a calling. They examine the Roman Catholic Church's involvement in welfare and look at the perils of the charitable choice provisions outlined in the welfare reform law. Working beyond the policy squabbles of the 1990s debate to the historical, moral, legal, and philosophical issues raised, these Harvard scholars argue that all of us, at some level, are called to step into the breach. "Our nation finds itself in the midst of an unexpected vigorous public discussion about what happens to those in need now that 'welfare as we know it' is gone. Much of that discussion however is historically ill-informed and philosophically thin. [Who Will Provide?] supplies the necessary ingredients to enrich and deepen the debate, and to give it focus." -Harvey Cox, Harvard University