*This review was originally published over at The Englewood Review of Books. If you have a few minutes, please go check out some of their other reviews.

Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his famous speech “A Time to Break Silence” that, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” I think these words, challenging as they are, express the conviction that undergirds the efforts of Liz Theoharis in her timely new book, Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor. Her contention is that Matthew 26:11, one of the most influential passages on poverty in Scripture, has often been twisted out of context in order to give red-lettered justification for viewing poverty as inevitable and pitting Jesus in opposition to the poor (13, 97). In her eyes, these conclusions have obviously damaging consequences.

Therefore, she seeks to show that, far from giving Christians reason to ignore calls for economic justice, this passage actually makes “one of the strongest statements of the biblical mandate to end poverty” (15). Reading Matthew 26:11 in this way may strike some as strange or odd. In part, this might be due to the unfortunate fact that Christian conversations about poverty in the Bible all-too-frequently fail to adequately include the voices of those actually experiencing poverty. Thankfully, Theoharis avoids this pitfall. She should be commended for intentionally giving space for the thoughts and ideas of poor people and grassroots antipoverty organizers to be heard (often in their own words), allowing their perspectives to help shape her development of an approach to reading Matthew 26:11 that allows the text to once again challenge, encourage, and inspire those working in their communities to end to poverty, rather than casting a shadow of indifference on their efforts (31-32). Continue reading →