Move the Money, Now more than ever (a WIRN webinar)

Move the Money, Now more than ever (a WIRN webinar)

As the US shovels billions of dollars into its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, the urgent needs of people here and around the world are ignored. The war corporations make a killing off of killing while people struggle just to have housing, jobs, food, medical care, and education. The climate emergency and nuclear war threaten our very existence on this planet. And yet the money goes to more and more destruction rather than to a just transition into a healthier and saner world. It’s time to move the money! This webinar will examine our national priorities as they are now playing out and describe how we need to change those priorities.

Speakers:

The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. She is the Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Rev. Dr. Theoharis is the editor of We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign (Broadleaf Press, October 12, 2021). She is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017) and co-author of Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing (Beacon, 2018).

In 2021, she received the Hunger Leadership Award from the Congressional Hunger Center, along with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II. In 2020 she was named one of 15 Faith Leaders to Watch by the Center for American Progress. In 2019, she was a Selma “Bridge” Award recipient and named one of 11 Women Shaping the Church by Sojourners. In 2018, she gave the “Building a Moral Movement” TEDtalk at TEDWomen, was named one of the Politico 50 “thinkers, doers and visionaries whose ideas are driving politics”, and was also named a Women of Faith Award recipient by the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Rev. Dr. Theoharis received her BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in 2004 where she was the first William Sloane Coffin Scholar; and her PhD from Union in New Testament and Christian Origins.

Lindsay Koshgarian is Program Director of the National Priorities Project, a part of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her work on the federal budget includes analysis of the federal budget process and politics, military spending, and specifically how federal budget choices for different spending priorities and taxation interact. A particular area of focus is how a decades-long policy of outsized military budgets has eroded political will to invest in opportunity and human potential through greater federal support of education, health care, infrastructure and more. Her articles have appeared in NPR, the BBC, CNN, The Nation, U.S. News and World Report, and others. She holds an MPP from UCLA and a B.A. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania.