WNC Programs: Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey Sachs

September 11, 2005

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“Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.”

So ends The End of Poverty, the latest book not by a theologian but by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Time magazine and the New York Times call Sachs the world’s most important and best-known economist. He rubs shoulders not only with the U.N.’s Kofi Annan, but with everybody from the Pope to U2’s Bono.

Bono writes in the introduction to Sachs’s book that Sachs is an economist “who can bring to life statistics that were, after all, lives in the first place. He can look up from the numbers and see faces through the spreadsheets.”

Come see vividly for yourself the faces Sachs sees—namely, the nearly half of the world’s 6 billion people who are poor, especially the 20,000 people who die each day because of extreme poverty.

“Extreme” poverty is defined as getting by on less than $1 a day; being chronically hungry, without health care, safe drinking water and education; and possibly even lacking shelter and shoes.

“Ending poverty is a grand moral task, and a geopolitical imperative, but at the core it is a relatively straightforward investment proposition,” Sachs wrote in an editorial in London’s the Guardian newspaper earlier this year.

Come hear Sachs describe not how daunting the problems are but how solvable. Sachs will talk about what can be done to make a real difference—what we can do as individuals and what we must ask our governments and institutions to do. Be inspired by an academic who, as one former senior administration official put it, has nearly completed “the transition from economist to Old Testament prophet.”

Jeffrey Sachs is director of the Earth Institute and Quetelet Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals. While at Washington National Cathedral, he will address a consultation of international religious leaders on what the religious sector can do to end extreme poverty.

For information please call (202) 537-2221 or e-mail programs@cathedral.org.

A Day of Reflection on Global Poverty

Come attend worship services and hear a lecture by Jeffrey Sachs as part of a day of reflection on ending extreme poverty across the globe. In addition to the regular service at 9 am and the service of Holy Eucharist in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at 11 am, there will be a special prayer service at 4 pm led by Dr. Madeleine K. Albright, former secretary of state of the United States, the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold III, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and the Most Rev. Njongonkulu W. H. Ndungane, archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, and the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The Cathedral Choir, the St. Camillus Multicultural Choir and the African Heritage Dancers and Drummers will be participants in the service, and the service will be preceded by a 3:30 pm choral prelude performed by the St. Camillus Multicultural Choir.

This day marks the launch of the new Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation at Washington National Cathedral. The 4 pm public prayer service precedes a two-day closed meeting of international religious leaders convened by the Center. More than thirty senior denominational leaders from around the world will explore what more their institutions can do to end extreme poverty, and how to bring southern and northern hemisphere Christian churches into closer collaboration toward achieving this goal. They will issue a communiqué summarizing their call to action that will be delivered to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan on the eve of the opening of the 60th U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders will assess progress on ending extreme poverty and the other Millennium Development Goals.