Social Justice Booklist

“Celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs has a plan to eliminate extreme poverty around the world by 2025. If you think that is too ambitious or wildly unrealistic, you need to read this book. His focus is on the one billion poorest individuals around the world who are caught in a poverty trap of disease, physical isolation, environmental stress, political instability, and lack of access to capital, technology, medicine, and education.” (Amazon.com)

Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder
This book takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to this philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity”—a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. At the heart of the book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve the problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one, too.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, Ronald Sider, 1997.
“Do you want to make a true difference in the world? Dr. Ron Sider does. He has, since before he first published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger in 1978. Despite a dramatic reduction in world hunger since then, 34,000 children still die daily of starvation and preventable disease, and 1.3 billion people, worldwide, remain in abject poverty. So, the professor of theology went back to re-examine the issues by twenty-first century standards. Finding that Conservatives blame morally reprehensible individual choices, and Liberals blame constrictive social and economic policy, Dr. Sider finds himself agreeing with both sides. In this new look at an age-old problem, he offers not only a detailed explanation of the causes, but also a comprehensive series of practical solutions, in the hopes that Christians like him will choose to make a difference.” (Amazon.com)

The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Western commentators have recently declared that Christianity is declining, and that it must modernize its beliefs or risk being abandoned altogether. In The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins argues that just the opposite is true: Christianity is on the rise in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in very traditional forms.”

Irresistible Revolution, by Shane Claiborne
Although this book isn’t an autobiography, in it Claiborne reports much about his life: growing up in the Bible Belt, become a Jesus freak, moving to Philadelphia despite his family’s misgivings, and helping the homeless there. Besides illuminating his own faith journey, Claiborne is insightful on the huge U.S. cultural and economic divide: the problem isn’t that wealthy Christians don’t care about the poor, he says, it’s that they simply don’t know the poor. A moving, often humorous account of a life of faith lived to the fullest.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah
This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah’s harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled with American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly sociopathic rebel and army forces.

Walking With the Poor, Bryant Myers, Orbis, 1999.
“Drawing on theological and biblical resources, secular development theory and work done by Christians among the poor, Myers develops a theoretical framework for transformational development and provides cutting-edge tools for those working alongside the poor.” (WorldVisionResources.com)

Christian Microenterprise Development: An Introduction, David Bussau and Russel Mask, 2003.
“The success of both secular and Christian microenterprise development programs has generated enthusiasm among many Christian organizations, missions, and local churches. This practical handbook shows readers how microenterprise development can enable them to serve communities with integrity, provides secular microenterprise literature, and presents eight case studies of Christian programs around the world to help practitioners and donors better understand how to apply Christian microenterprise development in ways that build Christ’s kingdom.” (WorldVisionResources.com)