The Invisible Caring Hand: American Congregations and the Provision of Welfare

Popular calls to transform our current welfare system and supplant it with effective and inexpensive faith-based providers are gaining political support and engendering heated debate about the separation of church and state. Yet we lack concrete information from which to anticipate how such initiatives might actually work if adopted.
Despite the assumption that congregations can help many needy people in our society, it remains to be seen how extensive they wish their involvement to be, or ...