Religious groups are giving the payday lending industry a run for their money.
Predatory Lending
Tim Kumfer 7-06-2011
Smack dab in the middle of the Lord’s Prayer, obscured by old translations and otherworldly assumptions, is a radical cry for Jubilee justice
Randy Woodley 7-07-2010
At the same time oil is spewing from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico, some politicians are already calling for more drilling, accompanied
Jim Wallis, Jeannie Choi 4-01-2010
Jim Wallis talks with Sen. Elizabeth Warren at Sojourners' Summit for Change in 2015.
Elizabeth Warren is more than just the head of Congress’s panel reviewing the bank bailout (officially, the Troubled Asset Relief Program). Along with being a Harvard Law professor, she’s also a plain-spoken and passionate advocate for everyday people who is deeply motivated by her Oklahoma Methodist upbringing, as she described in an interview with Sojourners editor-in-chief Jim Wallis and assistant editor Jeannie Choi this February.
Wallis: Particularly for people of faith and conscience, what’s at stake in the battle over financial regulation that we’re in now?
Warren: Our future is at stake, and the future of our children. The story works this way: We had a boom-and-bust economy from 1794 until 1930. Our young nation would lurch from moments of great prosperity to moments of economic panic. Coming out of the 1930s, our leaders crafted a set of basic rules that put fairness into the marketplace: FDIC insurance that made it safe to put money in banks; Glass-Steagall, that said banks that take deposits cannot go out and speculate with your money; some honesty rules for Wall Street through the SEC. Those rules brought us 50 years of economic security and prosperity.
By the 1980s, some of those were outmoded—but instead of trying to think through what kind of rules we need to create a fair marketplace, we just began to throw the rules out. The credit marketplace became a lawless arena.
Rachel Anderson 10-14-2009
After all the financial turmoil that 2009 has already brought, one would think that it would somehow be logical and practical to bring accountable reforms to the same banking institutions whose re
Tom Allio 8-05-2008
The people of Ohio won a big victory over the predatory payday lending industry this June when a new state law banned the sky-high interest rates that had trapped many poor Ohioans, as Tom Allio describes in the August issue of Sojourners. Below, Allio, who is chair of the coalition of faith-based consumer, labor, and human services groups that won the [...]