Howard, Charles Lattimore, ed. The Souls of Poor Folk.

AuthorWilson, Jamie J.
PositionBook review

Howard, Charles Lattimore, ed. The Souls of Poor Folk. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008. 104 pages. Paper, $19.95.

Using a title inspired by W E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the Reverend Charles Lattimore "Chaz" Howard, associate chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of the Greater Love Movement, offers an edited collection of seven essays written by a law professor, a fellow at the Washington Institute, a nurse, and three ministers, each offering probing and thoughtful reflections about how each particular author and others have engaged in local, national, and international pursuits to alleviate poverty. All seven essays, including the preface by Dennis P. Culhane, professor of social welfare policy and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the afterword by author James Spady, open with an epigraph by singer/songwriter/producer "Souls" Rob Murat, and every essay merits attention in its own right as each moves its readers to reconsider their position in struggles against economic injustice and to consider their relative privileged position.

Spady's "Long Ways From Home: Motions, Memories and Katrina's Storm Surge" discusses responses by "members of the leisure time industry" (p. 6) to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Delta regions of the United States. Through interviews with Philadelphia celebrities Musiq, Jill Scott, Jarrett Jackson, and Allen Iverson, Spady demonstrates that the Hip-Hop community stood at the forefront of disaster-relief efforts in cities throughout the country. In "From Refugee Camps in the City of the Dead: Poverty in the Middle East," Andrew Axum ruminates on his experiences in Haiti; Cairo, Egypt; eastern Afghanistan; Philadelphia; and Beirut, Lebanon, and maintains that there is no panacea for global poverty. In order to eliminate poverty throughout the world, he argues, nations, organizations, and individuals must first engage the specific "collective narratives" of poor peoples (p. 20).

The Reverend Debbie Little-Wyman, in her moving essay "Come and See;' relates lessons that she has learned during her ministry among the homeless population of Boston, as well as her understanding of the theology of the poor. Without romanticizing poverty, she states that homeless individuals can offer poignant lessons to those who are privileged and provides a challenge to everyone, but specifically Christians, to embrace...

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