Volume 49, Number 18 · November 21, 2002
Loving the Poor
By Brent D. Shaw
Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire
by Peter Brown
University Press of New England, 176 pp., $35.00; $15.95 (paper)
In one of his most quoted sayings, Jesus is reported to have warned: 'You have the poor with you always' (Mark 14:7). It was not original. He was reiterating an ages-old prophetic utterance from the Hebrew scriptures: 'The poor will always be with you' (Deuteronomy 15:11). Certainly today the claim seems never to have been truer, and precisely in connection with political power. Since 1995, the United Nations alone has staged no fewer than three global conferences on the problem of world poverty. The divide between the rich and the poor throughout the world is one of the most pressing items of international concern in the rhetoric of contemporary politics. Although definitions of who is poor have always posed as many problems as the poor themselves, there seems little doubt that, according to almost any measurement, the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening at a dizzying pace. The confrontation between wealth and poverty has become a central problem for the world community in a way that was simply untrue only a century ago. The key term in this transformation of our concerns and attitudes, however, is not so much poverty as it is community.
Review, 4149 words
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