Issue 35 PovertyBlog | Lady Poverty: a transformational response
Lady Poverty: a transformational response
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 24.06.23
The singer Bono has a lot to answer for. Not only has he created some fabulous music, but he is also one of the inspirations behind the celebrated Poverty and Justice Bible. Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, 17 years ago, he noted that there are almost 3000 verses in the Bible to do with poverty. ‘That’s a lot of airtime,’ he said.
With its vivid orange markup of the most obvious passages on the subject, the Poverty and Justice Bible looks like someone has taken their own copy of the scriptures, and messily run a highlighter pen over the relevant texts from Genesis to Revelation. One on almost every double page spread.
Years before, the Christian campaigner Jim Wallis went as far as physically cutting out from his Bible all the bits about the poor. Holding up his now diminished Bible, he would call it a ‘Hole-y Bible.’ Not much of it remained and it was known as the Bible full of holes. I wouldn’t recommend taking scissors to scripture myself, but he made his point.
It was back in the days of Margaret Thatcher that the former Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, in a storm of controversy, wrote an explosive book called Bias To The Poor. In doing so, he wasn’t being ‘woke’ or politically correct, he was saying something incredibly significant about the very nature of the kingdom of God.
