Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(02:00–03:50) Music
"The Multiples of One" from Awakening, performed by Joseph Curiale

(03:52–05:28) Music
"The New Orleans Function/The Death Of Jazz" from The Majesty of the Blues, performed by Wynton Marsalis

(03:55) History of Social Programs
In his book, Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen, Hilfiker points out that well-intentioned social programs of the early 20th century intending to help the poor often hurt poor African Americans:

The Depression, of course, meant poverty for many people, but African-American workers, at the bottom of the pecking order, were the first to be let go and the hardest hit. As the economy gradually picked up during the late thirties, white workers were the first rehired, leaving disproportionate numbers of African Americans on relief or in federal work camps. To make matters worse, African Americans were largely excluded from the most important of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs to alleviate poverty. Social Security and mandatory unemployment insurance, for example, were two of the central elements of social insurance introduced during the Depression, but they both specifically excluded domestics and agricultural workers. Since two-thirds of employed African Americans were then either domestics or agricultural workers, most blacks were not eligible for benefits. While the rest of the country was receiving significant Federal help moving out of poverty, African Americans were generally left out.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another important anti-poverty agency established during the Depression, guaranteed mortgages for up to 90 percent of the purchase price of a house, making down payments of 10 percent the norm, and it also extended the repayment period to twenty-five or thirty years. Previously, lenders had required down payments of up to one-third the cost of a home's purchase price, making home ownership impossible for many. During the waning years of the Depression and again after World War II, FHA guarantees not only allowed families to become homeowners (and thus accumulate wealth), but also created local jobs and provided investment in the community. Between 1934, when the FHA was founded, and 1969, the percentage of families owning their own homes increased from 44 percent to 64 percent. Citing concerns that poorer black neighborhoods were not good financial risks, however, the FHA "redlined" almost all African-American communities, refusing to guarantee mortgages there. Private lenders followed suit. After World War II, the Veterans Administration used the same redlining policies, ensuring that returning African-American servicemen were excluded from the program. These policies excluding African Americans from government largesse lasted well into the 1960s.

For three decades, from the 1950s on, black neighborhoods in America were decimated through the introduction of the federal Urban Renewal — often referred to as "slum removal" — and Interstate Highways program. Hilfiker writes:

Urban renewal was initially meant to revive decaying inner-city neighborhoods by transforming them into new, architecturally interesting cultural, commercial, and residential centers. Again, because African Americans generally held less political power, black ghettos were often the chosen sites for slum removal. Significant parts of black ghettos were razed and rebuilt, often as magnets for business or tourism, such as the Loop in Chicago, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or (somewhat later) the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. Not without justice were the slum renewal programs sometimes called "Negro removal."

As part of urban renewal, the federal government provided money for the construction of some new public housing for those displaced by the changes. Reasoning that limited resources should go to the poor, Congress set strict income limits on who could live in these new housing "projects." Functionally, this meant that the poorest members of the black ghetto were moved somewhere else in the city and segregated by class as well as by race, only intensifying their isolation from the larger society. The worst of these projects were high-rise towers that housed many people in small geographic areas. In addition, such public housing provided on average only one unit for every ten units destroyed. The rest of those evicted by urban renewal had to squeeze into whatever already overcrowded ghetto areas remained.

The Interstate Highway program instituted in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower repeated the process. As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants.
The federally subsidized highway programs also facilitated the suburbanization of the North, contributing to the erosion of its cities. Increasingly affluent whites were eager to leave those cities, and the government subsidized this exodus by building roads that made daily access to urban workplaces from the suburbs far more feasible.

(05:06) Urban Renewal in American Cities
For an interesting personal account of the effects of the federal Interstate Highway program on an urban community in Minnesota, read Evelyn Fairbanks' memoir, The Days of Rondo. Rondo Avenue, once the heart of St. Paul's largest African American community from the 1930s through the 1950s — vanished with the building of Interstate 94 in the 1960s. Fairbanks conveys heartwarming human stories of struggle and mirth in a once vibrant but now vanished community.

(11:37–13:09) Music
"I See the Light" from Citi Movement, performed by the Wynton Marsalis Septet

(09:10) Quote from FEMA Director
Former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Michael Brown had told reporters on September 1, 2005, "We're finding more and more people coming out of the woodwork. They're appearing in places we didn't know they existed."

(12:20) The Church of the Saviour
The Church of the Saviour was formed in 1947 by Gordon Cosby, a Baptist Minister, who questioned the modern idea of what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a church. From the beginning, the community was ecumenical. It is not centered around Sunday services but around small groups committed to the complementary goals of deepening one's relationship with God and addressing some aspect of need in the world in a hands-on way. A web of affiliated non-profits emerged, known as the Jubilee Ministries. Today these ministries include an employment agency for the homeless, a coffee shop, a bilingual medical center for people who can't afford health insurance, several transitional houses, and the Christ House medical shelter for homeless men that David Hilfiker helped create.

In Call to Commitment, Elizabeth O'Connor, a founding member of Church of the Saviour describes the shifting hierarchy of the church:

Our structures would never be static, and the experiences we were having today would enable us to do the next thing, and what we were doing now would probably be quite different from what we would be doing three or five or ten years from now. We never have expected to hit upon that final stable structure. This is important for a church to understand, for when it starts to be the church it will constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices to sound above the noises of the street, perhaps in large part it is because the pioneering spirit has become foreign to it. It shows little willingness to explore new ways. Where it does it has often been called an experiment. We would say that the church of Christ is never an experiment, but wherever that church is true to its mission it will be experimenting, pioneering, blazing new paths, seeking how to speak the reconciling Word of God to its own age.

From 1976 to 1995, the Church's structures changed shape several times during this period: sister communities formed under the umbrella of the Church of the Saviour, including the Servant Leadership School, Christ House, and Joseph's House. In October 1995, the organization was willingly disbanded and eight of the churches existing at that time are now legally separate entities.

(19:00) Hilfiker's Description of First Days in D.C.
In the chapter, "First Days," from Not All of Us Are Saints, Hilfiker describes his journey from rural Minnesota to the inner city of Washington, D.C.:

In September 1983, Marja and I moved to the inner city of Washington, D.C., with our three children—Laurel, who was twelve years old, Karin, who was about to turn nine, and Kai, who was four. We rented the top two floors of a brick, three-story row house in the rapidly changing Mount Pleasant neighborhood, three miles due north from the White House. The neighborhoods on each side of us could not have been more different. Two blocks to the east lay one of Washington's mini-ghettos, where, in the heat and mugginess of those September evenings, adults still congregated on the steps of the run-down apartment buildings, the sidewalks, and the other open spaces while children played in the streets and alleys. A constant stream of cars moved slowly through the street, for an active drug market flourished exactly where the young children played, with older children often acting as "runners" for only slightly older sellers. Two blocks to the west of us were old, well-kept row houses in a quiet, middle-class, racially integrated neighborhood bordering on the wide swath of Rock Creek Park, which swept across our northern border. Two blocks to the south was a slightly shabby business strip, an area quickly becoming the center of a large community of Salvadoran refugees. …

Although in Washington there are few rigid geographical dividing lines separating the well-off from the poor, Malcolm X Park, sitting atop Meridian Hill, marks a very real border. It is a lovely place to walk in daylight, with an ornate garden, winding paths, a spectacular cascading waterfall, and beautiful reflecting pools that invite meditation. Groups of either African or Hispanic immigrants (but never mixed groups) seem always to have a soccer game in progress. At night, according to local residents, the park belongs to a different element of the city: The drug sellers move in from Chapin Street, two blocks to the east, and young girls trade sex for crack among the bushes and in dark corners. But during the day, one feels very much a part of a comfortable, affluent culture in the nation's capital.

A few blocks later, on Fourteenth Street, it was hard to believe we were in the same city. Lots lay vacant; storefronts were boarded up. Scores of people milled around in one of the largest open-air drug markets in the city; police waited in cars on the corner, apparently unable to do anything. Behind a complex of three large, run-down apartment buildings stood another: a burned-out reminder of the riots that followed Martin Luther King's assassination. One block farther, we turned onto Belmont Street, a two-way street that officially became one-way at sunset in order to prevent suburban cars from driving back and forth, cruising for drugs. (As far as I could tell, no one ever paid much attention to the prohibition.)

(20:17–20:53) Music
"No Time" from Version 7.0: The Street Scriptures, performed by Guru

(26:14) Reading from Hilfiker's Book
Krista read a passage excerpted from Hilfiker's book, Not All of Us Are Saints: A Doctor's Journey with the Poor:

My daily experience of a dreadfully fallen world makes it important to demystify this "Love of neighbor" business. Love for neighbor has little to do with my feelings. It has little to do with whether I like my neighbor or trust my neighbor. Rather, it has to do with a simple question: Do I want the best for my neighbor? "Forgiveness" is continuing to want the best for my neighbor even after he or she has spit in my face.

(28:16–31:17) Music
"When the Levee Breaks" from Blues Classics by Memphis Minnie, performed by Memphis Minnie

(31:30–32:25) Music
"Baby Won't You Please Come Home" from Ballads, performed by Miles Davis

(36:14) Reference to Joseph's House
Joseph's House, started by Hilfiker in 1990, is a residence in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. that provides shelter and care for homeless men who are in the late stages of AIDS. Read an article about one reporter's experience there.

(37:59–38:53) Music
"I See the Light" (instrumental) from Citi Movement, performed by the Wynton Marsalis Septet

(40:17) Citation from Walter Brueggemann
In discussing his experience of God, Hilfiker cites a passage from theologian Walter Brueggemann's book, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, which concentrates on specific verses from the biblical book of the prophet Jeremiah:

Are you a king because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me? says the Lord.

     —Jeremiah 22:15-16, New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

Verses 15-16 are a stunning act of social criticism, the most poignant of its kind in the entire Bible. The poet raises the question of what constitutes legitimate social power. He asks with disdain if it is visible luxury that constitutes kingship. That rhetorical question is answered in vv. 15b-16 by comparison to Josiah, who "did justice and righteousness." Again the key terms, "justice and righteousness," occur, placed in contrast to the seductions of cedar and vermillion, marks of affluence. "Justice and righteousness" are a precise contrast to the base, self-serving values of Jehoiakim. As a result of his social policy of caring for the weak and needy, Josiah prospered and had secure rule. Josiah is characteristically regarded as the king who executed policies according to the covenantal requirements of the Deuteronomist. He is portrayed as the embodiment of the best of Moses' covenantal dream.

The final line of v. 16 is one of the most remarkable in Scripture. It equates "knowing God" with doing justice to the needy. The equation needs to be seen in its full claim. It is not asserted that knowledge of god leads to justice, nor conversely is it claimed that social justice leads to the knowledge of God. They are the same. One might, on the basis of this text, conclude that the practice of justice is the very reality of Yahweh. In this text we are very close to the contemporary conversation about praxis as the mode of faith. In the most radical terms, this poetry anticipates John Calvin's judgment that right knowledge of God comes through obedience.

(41:18) The Difference Between Charity and Justice
Hilfiker draws a distinction between charity work and working for social justice and says there is an inherent conflict between the two. For a more in-depth perspective of Hilfiker's views, read his essay, "When Charity Chokes Justice," [PDF] in which he asks the questions: How do works of charity support an unjust system? How can we both do charity and work for justice?

(43:39) Book by Michael Harrington
Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States, originally published in 1962, played an influential role in exposing the injustices that were happening in America. Staff members, such as Joseph Califano, who helped to orchestrate President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" cite it even today.

(45:05–45:45) Music
"Americana" from Rarum, Volume 1: Selected Recordings, performed by Keith Jarrett

(48:57–49:44) Music
"How Long?" from Citi Movement, performed by the Wynton Marsalis Septet

(49:45–52:32) Music
"When the Levee Breaks" from Blues Classics by Memphis Minnie, performed by Memphis Minnie