Marvin Olasky

Several readers have asked me what I’ve learned from interviewing homeless people during my stays in shelters. Hmm. One book about health care costs features this title: “Never Pay the First Bill.” I’ve encountered exceptions, but if we hope to be both compassionate and constructive, our rule should be, “Never Accept the First Explanation.” I tried to stay at shelters for at least four days. In Missouri, 32-year-old Mirenda (that’s her real name, and she specified that the fourth letter is an “e”) said on day one that she was homeless because of the foster care system. That system was clearly a problem for her, as it is for many kids bounced from house to house. Eight different placements is Read More ›

As I prepare to bring this series of weekly columns to a close after three years, I think back to 1989 when I started to research three centuries of American poverty-fighters. I wrote about them in a 1992 book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, that became the historical basis for the “compassionate conservatism” popularized by Texas Governor George W. Bush, whom I informally advised (and still like). The project fizzled during his presidency, ground down by Washington politics but also by some internal realities. Regarding help for those sunk into long-term homelessness, two of my notions proved inadequate. First, in promoting “compassionate conservatism” I emphasized the literal meaning of “com-passion”: with suffering. My goal was for the homed, particularly Christians, Read More ›

Bob Coté, the homeless man turned homeless shelter pioneer whom I wrote about last month, used to say, “Work works.” By that he meant not only that work brings in money but also that it brings purpose and community. Paul the apostle also spoke about helping others: Do something useful with your hands, he wrote in Ephesians 4:28. Paul’s injunction to church members was strong: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ…we give you this rule: ‘If man will not work, he shall not eat.’ We hear that some among you are idle. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they Read More ›

Sticking a homeless person into an apartment without requiring anything from him is a bad idea not only because idle hands often turn to drugs, alcohol, or other mischief. It’s also a bad idea because not requiring work that a person can do is treating him as sub-human. Here it’s important to understand the biblical concept of labor, both before and after the traumatic events in the Garden of Eden. If work were something that had to be done only because of man’s sin and fall from grace, then we would be right to treat it as something to be endured only until “Miller time” arrives — but Genesis 2:15 (pre-fall) tells how “The Lord God took the man and Read More ›

Today is Good Friday. Nearly two thousand years ago it seemed a very bad Friday. Jesus, as the Apostles Creed puts it, “was crucified, died, and was buried.” God turned bad into good, as He regularly does. Romans 5:8 in the New Testament declares, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christians are supposed to get used to bad/good Fridays. Communist-turned-Christian Whittaker Chambers wrote, “a man can scarcely call himself a Christian for whom the crucifixion is not a daily suffering.” The idea of “suffering with” homeless people and others in danger (the literal meaning of compassion) is central in Christianity because it was central in the life of Christ. Read More ›

Next month I’ll lay out my upcoming book on homelessness, but the book will only make sense if you understand the process of Step 13 and Springs Rescue Mission that I’ve laid out in this first quarter of the year — so here’s part of an interview I did with Bob Coté 16 years ago. Olasky: Does the step-by-step process to moving upstairs and getting a better room really work? Coté: They want to get up there. I have 12 full-time employees, but really I have 52, because I have 40 people with a year or even two years of residence and they take ownership of Step 13. They’ll say, “Hey, we don’t write on the walls here,” and the Read More ›

Three years ago, I began writing my Human Lives column about homelessness on the Discovery Institute website. I’ll be concluding that series at the end of next month, but I’d like Discovery Institute supporters to know about some prizes announced today that will hearten those concerned about journalism, homelessness, or both. Over the years, The New York Times editorially has supported neither Intelligent Design nor the intelligent design of programs to help homeless individuals. Nor is the Times accustomed to getting awards from Christian organizations — but Christian groups that fight homelessness are equally unaccustomed to getting positive stories in the Times. That’s why a story by reporter Jason DeParle four days before Thanksgiving last year was particularly memorable. DeParle Read More ›

This year I’ve written about what I learned in Colorado Springs at the Springs Rescue Mission. But when I stayed there last year, I also thought of the pioneer who, starting in 1983, built a predecessor of SRM just up the highway in Denver. His name: Bob Coté, a six-foot-three-inch ex-amateur boxer who in his forties changed his life by not drinking his usual half gallon of vodka for lunch. Instead, he poured out the bottle’s contents and became in 1983 one of the original residents of a new program, Step 13. Bob became Director of Operation and then Executive Director, pouring what he had learned as a homeless alcoholic into a program that challenged rather than coddled men seen Read More ›

Today’s biggest public policy error concerning homelessness emerges from the fallacy that everyone deserves his own apartment and that true compassion means providing one. The federal government’s “Housing First” mandate sits on the materialistic assumption that an apartment is the appropriate response to addiction, mental illness, loneliness, and purposeless living. Thirty-six years ago, I came out with a book entitled The Tragedy of American Compassion. It included seven ways to fight poverty in alphabetical order. The first two were Affiliation and Bonding: restoring social ties that were broken or weaving new ones. Many recent trends have battered affiliation and bonding, but they are still key. Falling into addiction instead of falling in love is a frequent failure. Although some are Read More ›

In the U.S. Capitol 30 years ago, on March 23, 1995, Rep. Glenn Poshard (D., Illinois) advocated for more federal spending for the poor and homeless. He said spending hundreds of billions on governmental poverty-fighting was not “wild-eyed liberalism [based on building] systems that end up manipulating and controlling the poor, more than liberating them.” Instead, the expenditures were biblical, because “if there is one thing evident in the Scriptures, it is that God gives priority to the poor.” Poshard criticized conservative policy analysts by quoting Jesus “from the Sermon on the Mount. Time and again he says, ‘blessed are the poor.…When I was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked Read More ›