Across Two Worlds

A number of years ago on a flight from SFO to the East Coast I was seated next to a guy who told me he was returning home after doing…

(Written for Christianity Today’s Better Samaritan Blog 1/15/21, click here for link to CT’s online post.) What is the role of hope in escaping poverty? A quick glance at the…

This blog appeared as a guest post earlier this month for reopeningthechurch.com, sponsored by the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College and National Association of Evangelicals. Like many churches, the…

Development practitioners and development economists have an interesting relationship. We talk about the same things, have many of the same interests, but don’t understand each other well. Practitioners sometimes see…

That Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer would eventually win the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has never been the subject of much debate in the development…

This post is taken from a blog post for the Center for Effective Philanthropy and contains excerpts from my new book Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving our…

I returned from Guatemala on this week, helping lead a group of 25 people on a visit to the village where our non-profit organization Mayan Partners works in the western…

#Giving Tuesday has to be one of the coolest “day” ideas in recent memory, but as the day ticks away, the question remains where to give?  Because there are only…

(Originally appearing in the Huffington Post 7/19/2016) In front of the glowing new offices of Twitter on the edge of the Tenderloin, I watch the programmer step over the soiled,…

Those of you who knew my father well know that he was in many ways a great man, and more importantly, a very good man.  He was also an excellent…

Some undergraduate students from Harvard asked me to write an article for a symposium on behavioral economics they were publishing in their undergraduate economics journal, the Harvard Economics Review.   I…

Reflections on Hope and Oaxaca (Extended version of piece appearing in Christianity Today, December 2015 print issue) This year we moved to a small village in Oaxaca for six months to…

What is a Christian Development Economist Good For?  Transcript of Keynote Talk Given at the Association of Christian Economists (ACE) Meeting, January 2015 Thank you for allowing me to speak…

The more I am involved in practitioner and academic development work, the more I have become aware of a great divide separating the secular and faith-based international development communities.  In not…

 Last Thursday, Vox ran a story highlighting our randomized trial with TOMS Shoes subtly titled “Buying TOMS Shoes is a Terrible Way to Help People.”  In the piece the author,…

Trust, Poverty, and Mexico (Christianity Today 5/22/15) What are the most important qualities of a society that allow economic prosperity to take root?  A lust for learning and knowledge?  A blistering work…

TOMS Shoes is one of the most well-known “double bottom line” companies, where generally the two bottom lines include both profit and social impact.   For every pair of TOMS Shoes…

Book review of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDun’s A Path Appears. Appearing in Christianity Today, February 25, 2015. Thanks to innovations in accountability, poverty-fighting efforts are flourishing like never before. The global…

Academic papers can be both obscure and intimidating for development practitioners and others whose interests are rooted in practical, everyday issues, especially academic papers written by economists.  Trying to stay…