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Religious leaders and members of Congress this week are getting a firsthand taste of what it’s like to eat on $4.50 a day as part of the “Food Stamp Challenge.”
In the challenge, participants try to live for a week on the average amount received by people who use food stamps, now known as the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP).
“We do need to put ourselves sometimes in other people’s shoes so we can really feel what they have to go through every day,” said Donna Christensen, a Democrat who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands as a nonvoting delegate.
The Food Stamp Challenge is part of Fighting Poverty with Faith, an annual interfaith initiative endorsed by 50 national religious organizations.
This year is a particularly critical one for the cause, faith leaders said, because Congress is considering significant cuts to the more than $64 billion program.
On Thursday (Oct. 27), religious and political leaders teamed up with current SNAP recipients to shop at a Safeway grocery store near Capitol Hill.
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“With the country slipping back into recession and Congress gridlocked along partisan lines, faith leaders from the districts of every Republican member on the super committee are urging them to reject the antitax ideology that they say would unfairly burden the nation’s most-vulnerable citizens.
More than 75 clergy members from across the country have signed a petition that condemns the six Republicans on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction for putting the pledge they made to a Washington lobbyist–Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge”–ahead of the pledge they swore on the Bible when they took office.
The taxpayer pledge was championed by Americans for Tax Reform, an advocacy and taxpayer group founded by Norquist in 1986 as part of the effort to protect the lower marginal tax rates established by Congress during the Reagan administration.”…
“Kristin Ford, communications director for Faith in Public Life, believes that although their message is not a new one, the super committee will think twice when it hears the message from the faith community–particularly from pastors within their own districts. She said that the petition’s goal is to approach the gridlock in Congress from a unique, respected, and politically neutral perspective–that of the clergy.
The pastors who signed the letter do not identify in a political way, she said. “These are people who are pastors first.”
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FPL provided media support for this event.
About a dozen religious leaders united Wednesday to denounce proposed legislation that would remove the state law that requires teachers to join a union — a push by GOP lawmakers that critics say is a means to weaken the power of organized labor in labor-heavy Michigan.
Leading the group of clergy men and women in a small news conference on the front steps of Sacred Heart Catholic Church was the Rev. John Pitts Jr., president of Interfaith Worker Justice — Metro Detroit, who said Senate Bill 729, introduced last week by Republican senators Arlan Meekhof, Phil Pavlov and Randy Richardville, was an attack against public workers.
“Thank God for collective bargaining, thank God for unions, thank God for higher wages, thank God for health care,” Pitts said in leading a chant among a small gathering of supporters.
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Along with dozens of faith organizations, Faith in Public Life helped organize the construction and delivery of the golden calf to New York.
Some have called it “a sideshow” to the real-life drama taking place in Zuccotti Park.
But the Rev. Donna Schaper and the faith leaders who have rallied around the Occupy Wall Street movement, say their involvement is as solid as their religious beliefs.
Schaper, senior minister at Judson Memorial Church, thinks the time has come for faith communities to join the voices protesting the scandalous corporate greed and income inequality affecting 99% of Americans.
“Some say faith leaders should stay out of this,” said Schaper. “But actually every faith gives preference to the poor. The Hebrew and the Christian scriptures are full of warnings about the acquisition of wealth to the harm of others and of the requirement that the poor and dispossessed be cared for.”
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Along with dozens of faith organizations, Faith in Public Life helped organize the construction and delivery of the golden calf to New York.
It was a coming together both in prayer and in purpose.
Religious leaders from mosques, synagogues and churches in our area came to Zuccotti Park, they say not to support the Occupy Wall Street protesters, rather because they too are part of this movement.
“There can be no such thing as justice until there is economic justice,” Rev. Michael Ellick of Judson Memorial Church said.
Rev. Ellick led the procession.
The group carried a golden calf, they say a symbol of our spiritual poverty, a false idol.
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