Gary Anderson | The Preferential Option for the Poor in the Bible

Modern persons tend to view charity “horizontally.” Discussion of our obligations to the poor revolve around the effectiveness of the donation (social justice) and the motivations of the donor (altruism). However, the Bible adds to these concerns a “vertical” axis, namely God. In this lecture we will consider how this view fundamentally changes the way people of faith view those who are poor.
Gary A. Anderson is the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought at the University of Notre Dame, and an internationally recognized scholar on the Old Testament, early Judaism and Christianity, and theological themes in the Scriptural tradition. A past president of the Catholic Biblical Association, he was Professor of Old Testament at Harvard Divinity School before moving to Notre Dame. Professor Anderson is the author or editor of more than ten books, including the award winners Charity: The Place of the Poor in the Biblical Tradition (Yale, 2013), Sin: A History (Yale, 2009), and Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament (Baker 2017). He has also written for The Christian Century, First Things, Commonweal, and America. He holds a PhD from Harvard University.
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This lecture is made possible through the support of grant #62372 from the John Templeton Foundation, “In Lumine: Promoting the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on Campuses Nationwide.”