As we enter into the final days and hours before the Parliament of Religions in Melbourne, Australia, we would like to take some time to reflect on the work ahead.  The 2009 Parliament will be ripe with challenge and promise and we will engage this opportunity by considering the interreligious movement as a whole. We are happy to share this series of five articles to help attendees prepare for their Parliament experience.

Our fourth article is written by Kim Bobo and is titled Ending Poverty: Real Questions for the Interfaith Community.  Bobo affirms the interreligious impulse to combat poverty, but contrasts individual acts of charity with the difficult and often controversial problems of systemic poverty.  Her article is a call to an authentic and ambitious response to poverty, and addresses how this can be achieved at the Parliament of Religions.

Kim Bobo is the Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice and is the former Director of Organizing for the organization Bread for the World. She is the author of Lives Matter: A Handbook for Christian Organizing and Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid – And What We Can Do About It, and co-author of Organizing for Social Change. She writes a column for the online magazine Religion Dispatches.  Please read her full article here.