TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Steve Timko
March 12, 2009

This is page one of a two-page article...interesting reading. Please click on "external source" for complete article.

Rick Gunn left Carson City in 2003 and spent almost three years pedaling around the world on his bicycle.
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Gunn, a former photojournalist for the Nevada Appeal, pedaled across 1,200 miles of Tibet at 16,000 to 18,000 feet while stricken with giardia. As a volunteer at an AIDS hospice in Thailand, at one point he risked contracting tuberculosis while caring for a dying woman. Then there was extreme poverty in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

"I watched people being hauled off the streets in Dhaka having starved to death," Gunn said. "They have trucks that go around and pick up the dead off the streets and sing a prayer for a proper burial."

The 45-year-old Gunn's long-term goal is to write a book about the journey, but in the meantime he's putting on multi-media shows. Gunn holds one Friday in Reno.

The seeds of the round-the-world adventure were planted by his mother, who wanted to travel around Europe. A kidney disease kept her from going for a long time, and then she finally went.

"As she got there, she had to turn around because she was too sick," Gunn said. "And she died without seeing the places she wanted to see. And that taught me a very powerful lesson."

Why on a bicycle?

"When you're inside of the car, it's almost like you're watching television," Gunn said. "You can't smell the smell. You can't feel the wind around you. And most importantly, you can't come in contact with the people. ... If you're on bicycle, you're perceived as one of them, even though you're a strange one of them."

By the time he made it to central Asia, he encountered extreme poverty in places in such as Tibet, Nepal and Bangladesh. The 52-day trip across Tibet with giardia left him fatigued and seriously considering quitting, so he took a break in Nepal and went rafting for a couple of months to rejuvenate and he saw a dead child floating in the river where he was rafting.

That kind of poverty inspired Gunn's goal of volunteering in each country, or at least making a record as a journalist of those doing things that made a difference.

Labels: adventure, bicycle, poverty, Rick Gunn, service, spirituality, Steve Timko, volunteering

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

New Study Reveals Sources of Resilience and Strength for Black Girls in New York City

March 7, 2009

New Study Reveals Sources of Resilience and Strength for Black Girls in New York City

Black Girls Face Hardships and Challenges

A new and unique report, Black Girls in New York City: Untold Strength and Resilience, was released by the Black Women for Black Girls Giving Circle (BWBG), a funding initiative of The Twenty-First Century Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). A key finding in the report is that the impact of poverty is especially acute in the lives of Black girls. Approximately three-quarters of the girls in the study live in low-income communities and households. Importantly, the report also explores the positive influences in Black girls' lives. It finds that girls who highly valued spirituality also tended to have an excellent relationship with their primary caretaker. Likewise, those who possessed a strong sense of racial identity were more likely than other girls to be happy on typical day, to receive better grades, to want a college education and believe in their ability to reach their goals.

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 7, 2009 -- A new and unique report, Black Girls in New York City: Untold Strength and Resilience, was released by the Black Women for Black Girls Giving Circle (BWBG), a funding initiative of The Twenty-First Century Foundation, and the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR). The report, commissioned by BWBG from IWPR pairs analysis of original data collected through written surveys and focus groups with a review of existing literature to provide an in-depth examination into the lives of Black girls living within the city of New York.

The report finds that the impact of poverty is especially acute in the lives of Black girls. Approximately three-quarters of the girls in the study live in low-income communities and households.

"Like all Black children, Black girls are at increased risk of living a life of poverty. But poverty plays out in the lives of Black girls in very distinct ways," remarked report author, Dr. Avis Jones-DeWeever, affiliate scholar of IWPR and Director of the Research, Public Policy and Information Center for African American Women at the National Council of Negro Women.

"Our surveys and conversations with adolescent Black girls in New York City show that many of the girls are at an increased risk of violence because of the economic situation of their families and economic conditions of their communities," emphasized Dr. Jones-DeWeever. "For far too many of the girls in our study, poverty truncates their childhood experience."

Most survey respondents indicated that they worry about their personal safety. Among those who feel unsafe at home, most attribute their uneasiness to drug activity in their community as well as the prevalence of violent crime, fights, and gang activity. Black girls most often indicated that they felt unsafe due to frequent fights at school.

The study also examines issues of self-esteem for Black girls, a group often considered immune to the impacts of mainstream culture on body image and self-confidence. While most of the Black girls in this study seemed largely satisfied with themselves, one-fifth indicated, that if given the opportunity, they would change their bodies in some way. A few expressed keen sensitivity to issues of skin tone. Some were teased harshly for being "too Black." Others even expressed a desire for skin bleaching; and in at least one instance, that ultimate desire was not just to become lighter, but instead, to become white.

Importantly, the report also explores the positive influences in Black girls' lives. It finds that girls who highly valued spirituality also tended to have an excellent relationship with their primary caretaker. Likewise, those who possessed a strong sense of racial identity were more likely than other girls to be happy on typical day, to receive better grades, to want a college education and believe in their ability to reach their goals, and when involved in intimate relationships, to engage in self-protective behavior by insisting upon condom usage.

Please click on "external source" to access the entire article, and the study.

Labels: African-Americans, BWBG, girls, IWPR, poverty, religion, spirituality

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

What do Alabama, Iran, Zimbabwe share? Religion

What do Alabama, Iran, Zimbabwe share? Religion

Feb 10, 2009

WASHINGTON (AFP) —

Eighty-two percent of Alabamans say religion plays a key role in everyday life, or around the same percentage as in Iran (83 percent) and the southern African state of Zimbabwe (81 percent), a poll conducted by Gallup showed Monday.

That could be because "a population's religiosity level is strongly related to its average standard of living," Gallup analysts Steve Crabtree and Brett Pehlam said in a report summarizing the findings of the poll.

The poverty rate in Alabama was 17 percent in 2007, according to the US Census Bureau, while World Bank statistics show around 20 percent of Iranians live in poverty.

In Zimbabwe, a country where the economy has been plummeting for a decade and inflation is running at several billion percent annually, at least 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line.

Also giving weight to the analysts' theory is the fact that the most religious US state, Mississippi, is also the poorest.

Eighty-five percent of Mississippians say religion is a key part of daily life, according to the poll, for which 1,000 adults each were interviewed in 143 countries between 2006 and 2008.

One in five Mississippians live in poverty, US Census data shows.

Religion was a key part of daily life for 17 percent of Swedes and 25 percent of Japanese.

When all 143 countries surveyed are taken into account, the median percentage for religiosity was 82 percent. The median is value in a set, above and below which there are equal numbers of values.

Although several states were above the global median, the United States taken as a whole fell well below it.

Even though God is invoked when the US president is sworn in, mentioned on dollar bills and in the pledge of allegiance that American students say daily to the flag, just 65 percent of Americans said religion matters in their everyday lives, according to the survey.

That puts the United States about five percentage points behind countries like Armenia, Jamaica, Kosovo, Mexico and Greece on Gallup's religiosity scale.

But "Americans look extremely devout" compared to 27 other wealthy nations, where the median of people who said religion is important in their daily lives was 38 percent, the Gallup analysts said.

Labels: Alabama, Gallup Poll, Iran. Zimbabwe, poverty, religion

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Can Religion Offset the Effects of Child Poverty?

October 23, 2007
By Melissa Lafsky

What steps can poor parents take to counterbalance the effects of poverty?

According to Rajeev Dehejia, an economics professor at Tufts University, one answer may be to join a church. Dehejia, along with Thomas DeLeire, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Erzo Luttmer and Josh Mitchell, from the Harvard economics department, have written a new working paper called “The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth.” In it, they test the impact of religion on more than 20,000 children raised by “disadvantaged” families, as defined by factors like family income, the parents’ levels of education, and “child characteristics including parental assessments of the child.” Using the National Survey of Families and Households, they questioned each child on the amount of involvement his or her parent had with a religious organization, then observed the child’s outcome 13 to 15 years later, as measured by education, income, and levels of health and psychological well-being.

Their findings are summarized as follows:

Overall, we find strong evidence that youth with religiously active parents are less affected later in life by childhood disadvantage than youth whose parents did not frequently attend religious services. These buffering effects of religious organizations are most pronounced when outcomes are measured by high school graduation or non-smoking and when disadvantage is measured by family resources or maternal education, but we also find buffering effects for a number of other outcome-disadvantage pairs. We generally find much weaker buffering effects for other social organizations.

Of course, a parent’s decision to practice a religion may coincide with other traits like self-discipline, community involvement, and mentoring skills, all of which will likely affect a child’s upbringing. Not to mention the fact that the authors offer no analysis of whether a parent’s including the child in the religion has any effect:
Our data do not allow us to determine to what extent the buffering effects are driven by religious organizations actively intervening in the lives of disadvantaged youth (through tutoring, mentoring, or financial assistance) as opposed to providing the youth with motivation, values, or attitudes that lead to better outcomes.

Still, it appears that, particularly where education and smoking habits are concerned, a parent’s heading to a church, synagogue, or mosque might be useful in counteracting the negative effects of child poverty.

Labels: children, Melissa Lafsky, National Survey of Families and Households, parents, poverty, Rajeev Dehejia, religion