Charitable Choices
John P. Bartkowski
Congregations and faith-based organizations have become key participants in America’s welfare revolution. Recent legislation has expanded the social welfare role of religious communities, thus revealing a pervasive lack of faith in purely economic responses to poverty.
Charitable Choices is an ethnographic study of faith-based poverty relief in 30 congregations in the rural south. Drawing on in-depth interviews and fieldwork in Mississippi faith communities, it examines how religious conviction and racial dynamics shape congregational benevolence. Mississippi has long had the nation's highest poverty rate and was the first state to implement a faith-based welfare reform initiative. The book provides a ... Read more
Product Details
About John P. Bartkowski
Reviews for Charitable Choices
Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare
Well-written and clearly organized.
Journal of Social Services
... Read more