Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Video: Robert Doar on poverty in America
Video: Robert Doar on poverty in America
Dec 30, 2025 9:48 PM

In July of this year, Robert Doar officially took the reins as President of the American Enterprise Institute, succeeding friend of Acton Arthur C. Brooks in that role. Yesterday, we were pleased to e Doar to deliver an address on poverty in America as part of the 2019 Acton Lecture Series. Doar reviewed the history of welfare reform during and after the Clinton Administration, discussed what works and what doesn’t when trying to help those in poverty to rise toward prosperity, and shared a bit of his personal story to illuminate how he came to be deeply interested in finding solutions to poverty.

We’re pleased to share the video of Doer’s presentation below.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The school of fish
The recent blogpost by my colleague Jordan Ballor discusses an op-ed written by law professor Stanley Fish. I am more familiar with Stanley Fish from his days as a literary theorist, and perhaps a quick review of a younger Fish will contribute to the conversation. Fish is known for, among other things, an idea of literary interpretation he called munities’ that suggests meaning is not found in the author, nor in the reader, but in munity in which the text...
Roadmap out of poverty
The last of many gems here: “Here’s Williams’ roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” — Walter Williams HT: The Anchoress ...
CAFTA vs. ‘Distributive Justice’
The Interfaith Working Group on Trade and Investment, a Washington-based amalgam of left-liberal religious activists, has asked the U.S. Congress to reject ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Here’s a representative statement: “Religious leaders boldly stood with impoverished people and called today for sustainable development in Central America and respect for the integrity of Creation.” Some of our best friends are impoverished? In this group’s statements, there’s scarcely an intelligible economic thought to be found or, for that...
The hermeneutical spiral
Mr. Phelps takes issue with my characterization of Stanley Fish’s position as amounting “to a philosophical denial of realism.” Let me first digress a bit and place ment within the larger context of my post. My identification of a position that “words and texts have no meaning in themselves” is really just an aside within the larger and more important question about what measure of authority authorial intent has in the interpretation of documents, specifically public documents like the Constitution....
Great debate
Foreign Policy hosts this exchange on environmental issues and economics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, gets the first word and Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, gets the last word. ...
CAFTA/Culture of Life: enemies?
John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relevance. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship (PDF) claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of...
Textual interpretation
A week ago Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the principles of constitutional interpretation, especially as represented by Justice Antonin Scalia. Fish takes issue especially with the notion that the text can have meaning “as it exists apart from anyone’s intention.” Fish essentially denies that texts are things that can have meanings in themselves, and it amounts to a philosophical denial of realism. Part of Fish’s problem is...
We must kill religion to save it
There are so many things wrong with this news item from Canada, I hardly know where to begin. But I’ll make perhaps the most obvious point of contradiction. This guy is “worried that the separation between church and state is under threat,” so he wants to initiate state control over religion, especially “given the inertia of the Catholic Church.” I’m not at all familiar with Canadian law. Is there something in Canada similar to the American Establishment Clause? ...
Labor (dis)union
The New York Times reports this morning that “leaders of four of the country’s largest labor unions announced on Sunday that they would boycott this week’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, and officials from two of those unions, the service employees and the Teamsters, said the action was a prelude to their full withdrawal from the federation on Monday.” The withdrawal is the culmination of a period of dissatisfaction with the direction of big labor in the US. The leaders of the dissident...
Animal cruelty?
I’m not quite sure what to make of this local story: “Four people are charged for their alleged involvement in killing two bald eagles.” The details of the alleged crimes are as follows: “Prosecutors say two teenagers shot the eagles in the Muskegon State Game Area with a .22 caliber rifle in April 2004 and then chopped them up with a hatchet.” Since the bald eagle, one of the nation’s revered symbols, is an endangered animal, it is protected by...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved