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.

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.

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.

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

Attempting to let 'everyday religion' raise critical questions about how we understand the role of religion in society, this book examines the social circumstances of religion's presence and absence.

Presents lively, research-based essays by premier social scientists on the positive and negative roles of religious groups in American public life.

As religion continues to regain its centrality in both academic and policy circles around the world, this book presents a new framework which examines the complex social and political dynamics shaping social welfare in the Middle East. Based on an in-depth study of the major Muslim and Christian religious welfare organisations in Lebanon (including Hezbollah), and drawing upon supplementary research conducted in Iran, Egypt and Turkey, the book argues that religion is providing sophisticated solutions to the major social and economic problems of the Middle East. It will be of use to students and academics of social policy, sociology, politics and Middle Eastern studies.

Handbook for Religion and Social Institutions is written for sociologists who study a variety of sub-disciplines and are interested in recent studies and theoretical approaches that relate religious variables to their particular area of interest. The handbook focuses on several major themes: - Social Institutions such as Politics, Economics, Education, Health and Social Welfare - Family and the Life Cycle - Inequality - Social Control - Culture - Religion as a Social Institution and in a Global Perspective This handbook will be of interest to social scientists including sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and other researchers whose study brings them in contact with the study of religion and its impact on social institutions.