Many thanks to Fr. Chad Hatfield, the Zarras family and St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary  for co-sponsoring and hosting the Conference on Poverty last weekend in New York.  I was delighted to be a part of it and visit St. Vladimir's...and the bookshop of course.

Ancient Faith Radio recorded the conference. You can listen to the whole conference at Ancient Faith. I've included some highlights below.

My lecture,  labelled Poverty Conference Three, was on re-framing the discussion about poverty around the centrality of the human person created in the image of God. Too often our first response to poverty is to ask what we can do, but the better is question is "How can people in the developing world create prosperity for the families and communities?"  I develop this theme throughout the talk. One warning:  At about 3 minutes in I showed a trailer for the PovertyCure DVD Series and you will only be able to hear the audio, so I recommend skipping forward to around 7 min or so for the rest of the lecture.

Listen to Poverty Conference Three

The whole conference was very interesting.  There was also a good debate in Session 4 that my colleague John Couretas was involved in--and I also recommend  the lecture by Jay Richard's of the Institute for Faith Work and Economics on 10 things to Help the Poor.  It is labelled Poverty Conference One.  This is adapted from Jay's excellent book Money, Greed and God and has a good story of Sir Edmund Hillary and Mount Everest as an analogy for economics.

Listen to Poverty Conference One

Listen to the entire conference at the Ancient Faith website.