Fix Homelessness

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Top down view at group of volunteers giving out simple meals to people in need at soup kitchen
Image Credit: Seventyfour - Adobe Stock
Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness
4

Sentimentality vs. Compassion

Marvin Olasky
December 27, 2024
Homelessness
4
I almost let 2024 slip away without a column about the 30th anniversary of The Homeless, an important book by scholar Christopher Jencks published in 1994. It included these sentences: "The homeless are indeed just like you and me in most respects. . . . But important as such similarities are, our differences are also important. To ignore them when we talk about the homeless is to substitute sentimentality for compassion." Read More ›
homeless-people-sleeping-in-sleeping-bag-and-cardboard-in-a-737602718-stockpack-adobe_stock
Homeless people sleeping in sleeping bag and cardboard in a street, concept of financial crisis, unemployment, lose job, vulnerable groups.
Image Credit: JW Studio - Adobe Stock
Marvin Olasky
December 20, 2024
Homelessness
5

In the Life of a Homeless Man

Marvin Olasky
December 20, 2024
Homelessness
5
With Christmas coming, I'm taking a timeout from my usual columnizing to send greetings to Tony, a homeless man in Colorado. He is 67 years old and may be sleeping in a North Face sleeping bag within an abandoned 144-square-foot wooden structure adjacent to a cemetery. (His summer bed has been a picnic bench about a third of a mile from a Safeway/Starbucks.) Read More ›
poor-homeless-or-refugee-barefoot-man-sleeps-on-the-street-i-190863737-stockpack-adobe_stock
Poor homeless or refugee barefoot man sleeps on the street in the shadow of the building
Image Credit: Srdjan - Adobe Stock
Marvin Olasky
December 13, 2024
Homelessness
5

Eighty Years of Homelessness Realism, 1914-1994

Marvin Olasky
December 13, 2024
Homelessness
5
I've written in recent weeks about the non-sentimental view of homelessness that was common in the late nineteenth century. For much of the twentieth century, that realism carried over into academic work as well. Read More ›
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jewish holiday Chanukah/Hanukkah family selebration. Jewish festival of lights. Children lighting candles on traditional menorah over glitter shiny background
Image Credit: biotin - Adobe Stock
Marvin Olasky
December 6, 2024
Homelessness
4

The Rarity of Homelessness in Judaism

Marvin Olasky
December 6, 2024
Homelessness
4
Christmas Eve this year is also the beginning of Hanukkah, an eight-day Jewish festival — and Jews are less likely to be homeless than non-Jewish Americans. That's not a new phenomenon. Between 1880 and 1914, about 1.5 million Jews (including my grandparents) emigrated from czarist Russia to North America. They lived apart from the mainly Christian charity networks, yet observers at the time noted very little Jewish homelessness. Why? Read More ›
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Unrecognizable woman hand helping man to stand up
Image Credit: Prostock-studio - Adobe Stock
Marvin Olasky
November 29, 2024
Homelessness
5

Gurteen and Lowell: Nineteenth Century Views on True Charity

Marvin Olasky
November 29, 2024
Homelessness
5
One Buffalo pastor, S. Humphreys Gurteen, said poverty was a problem, but an underlying cause was not material. He worried about the “concentrated and systematized pauperism which exists in our larger cities.” Gurteen wrote regarding “paupers” — those among the poor who had given up on working — that, “If left to themselves and no kind hand is held out to assist, they will inevitably sink lower and lower, ’til perchance they end their course in suicide or felony.” Read More ›
Rat_Pit_image_Wikimedia_Commons
Image by Edward H. Savage, no known copyright restrictions exist, accessed at Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Police_records_and_recollections,_or,_Boston_by_daylight_and_gaslight_-_for_two_hundred_and_forty_years_(1873)_(14780252001).jpg
Marvin Olasky
November 22, 2024
Homelessness
5

Jerry McAuley’s Nineteenth Century Homelessness Ministry

Marvin Olasky
November 22, 2024
Homelessness
5
In 1872, McAuley rented a small Water Street room with funds provided by church leaders who admitted the failure of their plan to import middle-class ecclesiastical style into the Rat Pit. McAuley's services were different than anything Water Street, or other mean streets, had seen. He invited in homeless men and others for cheap but hot food, and lots of hot stories. Read More ›