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12.13.2023 / News, Peace and Justice

One Book, One Diocese: Poverty, By America

The Peace and Justice Committee invites the Diocese of Chicago to participate in year two of their “One Book, One Diocese“ program. For 2024, the book selection is Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond.

“One Book, One Diocese” is a four-year sequence of diocesan readings that address the four interlocking evil systems outlined in the Poor People’s Campaign: racism, poverty, militarism and the war economy, and ecological devastation. In 2023, the program focused on racism, with participants reading and discussing Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter by the Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas.

Congregations and individuals are invited to read and discuss Desmond’s book, and will be invited to attend diocesan discussions in April. Scholarship funds are available for individuals and churches needing assistance to procure books. Contact the Peace and Justice Committee for information.

 

About Matthew Desmond:

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”

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