On the other side of the gates.(The Public Square: A Continuing Survey of Religion, Culture, and Public Life)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, March, 2006 by Neuhaus, Richard John

During those younger years as the pastor of a poor, black, inner-city parish in Brooklyn, including the years of working with Martin Luther King, Jr., I was an unapologetic romantic about the critical, even redemptive, part that blacks were to play in the unfolding of the American drama. Many of us were. The subsequent years have been hard on Dr. King's dream. True, most black Americans ore better off in most ways of calculating better off. But my version of the dream was attuned to the poor, and especially those concentrated in the hard core of the inner city.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was much chatter about the "rediscovery of the poor." It was almost all nonsense, and I fiercely wish that were not so. By the 1980s it had become widely recognized that...

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