I Read Poverty, by America
and I remember
Sometimes I buy books with appealing titles. Poverty, by America is one of these books. Below are books it got me thinking about. And there are traces of these books in my last essay.
Title:Â When I Was a Child I Read Books
Author: Marilynne Robinson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year of Publication: 2012
The Fate of Ideas: Moses is an essay included in When I Was a Child I Read Books. Robinson writes with an eye on the past and the present. In this essay, for instance, she sees history repeating itself.
"The intention behind these books (scholarly-looking books about the bible) seems to be only the one that is usual just now, to discredit in the course of laying blame."
She addresses the errors in some of these books and the "uneasy relation of the Old to the New Testament."
Title: Is the Welfare State Justified?
Author: Daniel Shapiro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year of Publication: 2007
Daniel Shapiro argues that normative arguments of political philosophers are not enough to result in welfare policies driving institutions. According to him, room should be given to empirical and social scientific arguments. This room is what he gives in the book to show that "normative arguments by themselves only provide us with reasons to believe that a certain feature of an institution is unjust or seriously defective" and that "without some social-science arguments that there is some institution that will lack or lessen the injustice or social evil, we have no reason, or at least no particularly weighty reason, to abolish or alter the institution." He points out that "the injustice or evil could be a necessary evil. It could be a sad truth about human affairs that we are stuck with that evil or injustice."
Title: Alms Charity, Reward, and Atonement in Early Christianity
Author: David J. Downs
Publisher: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY PRESS
Year of Publication: 2016
Two things that caught my attention when I started to read this book;
- how the author discusses and situates the gift-giving of the early church within the context of the economics of classical antiquity.
- how he tries to resolve the conflict between the atoning effect of Jesus's death and the idea that almsgiving rid the rich Christians of their sins after baptism.