What the poor need is not charity, but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers.
Interpretation
The poor require opportunities and collaboration instead of mere charity.
Clarence Jordan's quote emphasizes the importance of providing the poor with capital and collaborative work opportunities, rather than just charity. It suggests that sustainable change happens through empowering individuals to work alongside others as equals, rather than being dependent on aid or assistance from above.
In practice
In a speech about community development, one might say, 'What the poor need is not charity, but capital, not caseworkers but coworkers.'
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
But most it is presumption in us when the help of heaven we count the act of men.
If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.
The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.
Ask yourself: What did I eat for breakfast today? What did I eat for dinner last night? You see how fast reality fades away?
There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
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