Archive for the ‘Reforming Foreign Assistance’ Category

Progressive & Religious – New Book Documents the Emerging Movement

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I wanted to be sure to flag for everyone in the Matthew 25 community my recent book, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life (List: $22.95, Now: $16.47 on Amazon). I interviewed Matthew 25 co-founder Mara Vanderslice while doing research for the book, and it captures the voices of so many religious leaders who are working, as the Matthew 25 mission statement says, to support a new kind of politics “that supports the common good and justice for the least of these.”

On the book’s companion website, I’ve also included podcasts with religious leaders such as Rev. Jim Forbes, Rabbi David Saperstein, Rev. Dr. Susan Thistlethwaite, Eboo Patel, and others.

Here’s what some others have had to say about the book. I would welcome comments about the book here in this community.

Praise for Progressive & Religious:

“Robert P. Jones understands that progressive faith is not simply a ‘left’ alternative to the Religious Right, but a bringing together of religious belief and practice with progressive politics…. Progressive & Religious convincingly shows how people of many different faiths are creating an authentic social vision for a pluralistic America. I commend this book to all who are seeking to join their faith and politics in working for a better world.”—Rev. Jim Wallis, Sojourners, author of The Great Awakening

“Robert P. Jones is one of the most searching, thoughtful and practical thinkers in the revival of religiously-rooted progressivism, and his book is a great blessing for that cause and for the country. Anyone—left, right or center—who wants a guide to this new movement would do well to spend time with this book.” —E. J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post, author of Souled Out

“This instructive book should be in front of every newspaper journalist and every spiritual progressive. Sensitive to theological as well as political concerns, Progressive & Religious is a valuable introduction to the contemporary struggle for a progressive spiritual transformation of the world that is taking place in most of the world’s religions.” —Rabbi Michael Lerner, Tikkun Magazine, The Network of Spiritual Progressives, author of The Left Hand of God

“An illuminating road map to religious re-discovery in contemporary America. With a marriage of journalistic enthusiasm and intellectual rigor, Robert P. Jones skips among the tensions that mar intra-religious relations in our society, smashing erroneous preconceptions and championing a renaissance in the way we look at faith. The result is a thorough examination of religion in modernity that highlights the progressive tendencies shared by all faiths in highly readable form.” —Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, American Society for Muslim Advancement


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Aid Watch

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

NYU economist and foreign aid skeptic William Easterly has just started a new blog to pay attention to, Aid Watch. The tag line reads, “Just Asking that Aid Benefit the Poor.” Easterly is not against foreign assistance per se; he is critical of a system and an advocacy network that measures success on the amount of money spent rather than results achieved.

I disagree with some of Easterly’s broad conclusions and think that more good probably comes out of foreign assistance than what he gives it credit for, but he is a necessary voice that is injecting a healthy skepticism and much-needed movements towards reform into a field that had become tacitly duplicitous in a “it’s the effort that counts” type of attitude. Easterly runs statistical analyses to show that most of the efforts (tens of billions of dollars of “efforts”) have in fact not counted towards any perceivable economic growth and has often rather led to further corruption and foreign dependence, a case he makes strongly in his unsubtley-titled latest book, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, written largely as a response to famed development economist Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possiibilities for Our Time.

While critical of some of the sensationalism and over-reaching claims in White Man’s Burden that mars his actually well-done statistical analyses, I also was somewhat relieved to see the rise of an undaunted challenger to the “we just need more money” Sachs agenda. Easterly was a long-time World Bank economist until he wrote his first book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, an extremely well-researched insider’s expose of the World Bank’s failures to produce any growth in its assisted developing countries. I became somewhat disillusioned by Sach’s End of Poverty claims as I did my own development work in Kenya, and Easterly has voiced a lot of common concerns found in the development field that needed a platform.

As many of us do believe it is important to address the poverty and disease found in some of the developing world, it is worth reminding ourselves that it is the poor we need to help, not our own consciences.

All of this to say: Easterly’s Aid Watch is worth watching.

UPDATE: A reader delivers a well-put point that a lot of aid is not designed to grow the GDP but to save feed, clothe, shelter, and save lives. Agreed. My point was merely that Easterly’s voice of reform, though often deficient and misguided, is useful in drawing attention to the quality of aid and not just the dollar value of aid. My hope is for modernization and better use of the tools.

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