Explain the Relevance of the Ministry of the Prophet Amos, a Prophet of Social Justice to Our Present Day Setting.

As horrifying as it is to think about, comparisons can be made between the situations of current workers in third-world countries and the plight of the African slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In many of the current poverty-stricken places seen around the globe, sweatshops are developed in order to employ laborers. Sweatshops are described as places of abysmal working conditions with low pay and tedious hours. In the article, "Black People in a White People's Country," Gary Nash notes that the African slave trade was originally developed to "fill labor shortages in the economies of its European initiators and their commercial partners." This description is similar to the motive behind the employment of third-world sweatshop workers. Both systems, ancient and modern, include the need for more laborers and disregard the vital needs of their employees/slaves as long as the work is getting done. Workers are harmfully exploited in both

Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” and Samuel Gompers’ letter to Judge Peter Grosscup offer different opinions concerning the course that people of different economic standings should take in regards to power and social stature. However, both works mean to steer society in what seems to be opposite directions. Carnegie focuses more on how the wealthy in the society should take the seemingly philanthropic approach whereas Gompers’ offers a more organizational and structured point of view.

The early church is an example for the modern church. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King states how discouraged he was with the lack of support he and his supporters received from the Church; which was supposed to be their greatest ally. The modern Church turned out to be one of King’s opponents by acting passively and resisting to offer help (King, 7). The early Church in Biblical times, however, stood up for what they believed was moral in accordance with their faith no matter what the consequence. As King states in the letter, the Church in his day and age does not want to deal with the United States’ social issues “…with which the gospel has no real concern” (King, 8). The modern Church’s lack of concern for social issues was a real problem, for the modern Church’s

On April 12, 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. composed one of his most famous letters in a Birmingham jail addressing eight prominent Alabama clergymen. This letter known as The Letter from Birmingham Jail has become one of the most important works in the fields of theology and ethics since its composition. In the following essay, I will attempt to provide a brief illustration of the intellectual landscape that King developed over his short life as well as touch major influential experiences that contributed to King’s ethical and theological developments as seen within this prolific letter. This endeavor is not only to satisfy my own curiosity, but more importantly begin to peer more deeply into this legendary prophet in the hopes that I may be able to apply his own theological understandings the context in which we live.

Large corporations such as Nike, Gap, and Reebok and many others from the United States have moved their factories to undeveloped nations; barely pay their employees enough to live on. Countries such as China, Indonesia, and Haiti have readily abundant cheap labor. There should be labor laws or an obligation of respecting workers to provide decent working conditions, fair wages, and safety standards.

I am only thinking about myself and have been conditioned by society that the poor are beneath me. Just as hooks states in her book, “Society is telling them that poverty and nihilism are one and the same. If they cannot escape poverty, then they have no choice but to drown in the image of a life that is valueless” (hooks, 198), we have been taught by society to believe that poverty and nihilism are synonymous, but this is not true. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, I believe it takes a nation to resolve the issue of poverty. Our society needs to dig deep to reignite the morals that generations in the past taught us; sharing our resources, whether monetarily or charitably, through understanding, kindness and generosity to those less fortunate. We all have to be ready to share liberally and recognize the fact that there are those who struggle and deserve attention paid to their struggles. By helping others who have not, we keep our humanity intact and maintain our ability to empathize and show compassion towards others. Our culture is based on working together and helping our neighbors. We need to stop considering the poor invisible and instead take personal steps to keep our communities thriving via good will towards others, and lending a helping hand. The poor, just as our environment, are our responsibility, and the sharing of resources is crucial to bringing an individual from poverty to a more

In a response to the Alabama clergymen's’ letter Martin Luther King Jr. addresses their concerns and works to connect with his audience by establishing his credentials by describing his work. He uses imagery and sets up his character to not only unify people, but to also to separate groups. From the start of the letter, he respectfully puts himself into a place of importance to coerce the reader to see the relevance of his words. King manages to display himself as a respectful fighter of injustice from the very start of the letter where he positions himself alongside his “dear fellow clergymen”(1). To show his status of someone with power he describes the image of his secretaries not being able to be efficient if he were to respond to every

God commands us to both appreciate our blessings while also sharing among the less fortunate. Today, the ‘less fortunate’ represent over three billion individuals living in poverty, with 50 million being American. Yet, “the top 10 richest Americans hold half of all the income in [America]” Simply for personal interest, multiple elites hoard their money rather than adhere to their moral obligations of being “generous and ready to share”.

“The wealthy class is becoming more wealthy; but the poor class is becoming more dependent. "(Doc 1) from Progress and Poverty, in 1879 by Henry George, he describes a social gap between the rich and the poor. He speaks of social differences and contrasts that are becoming more prominent in noticeable. Another piece of this evidence of the gap of wealth growing larger is a source from Andrew Carnegie in the Gospel of Wealth in 1889. (Doc 2) he begins speaking of a wealthy man's responsibility to his community. He then goes on saying he (the wealthy) must act as a parental figure in reality, since they should give the poor since they lack the knowledge, experience, and more since those with money can do it better than the poor could. Andrew Carnegie is reaching out to the poor, and attempting to aid them, on the contrary, baby feeding the poor will not “Help them help themselves "as spoken by President Kennedy. By offering them opportunities rather than rations of

The book of Amos is the earliest preserved example of classic prophetic writings. It consists of nine chapters, but Amos did not write the entirety of them. “A majority of scholars think that not all of the material in Amos goes back to the prophet himself but was added later by ancient editors of the book.” The anthology contains a variation of materials: prophecies, visions and addresses from Amos to the people of Israel. Two major themes of the book are the social injustice in Israel, and the impending doom in Israel’s future.

Solomon suggests the economy is in need of economic reform based on the unjust way our economy operates . He brings attention to the fact that most religions encourage followers " to look after the poor, to heal the sick, to provide food and shelter for those in need, to educate, and to pursue justice"; yet, our current economic system makes it hard for the poor to get the help and resources they need. (pg. 98) Solomon questions if wealth can be equitably distributed. The fact is that human greed makes the equitable distribution of wealth seem impossible. Solomon uses Jewish Literature to explain this further. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto, as mentioned in the text, says "For there is no worldly pleasure upon whose heels some sin does

The main point of this article is social ethics as it pertains to the prophets, and we must understand what the author means by social justice as he mentions it several times in the section dealing with social ethics. Bratcher means that social justice is the failure to function socially in a way that defends the weak and powerless in

For example; the United States itself and other nations such as Somalia and Congo continue to have people with no shelter over their head and those with no food to eat, regardless of how hard some may strive to make ends meet, they are still in poverty. As those more auspicious, we should consider it as a moral obligation to assist those people who are less fortunate, be it those in the same nation as us or those farther away.

In my study about the prophet Amos and Social Justice, it was discovered that Amos was the earliest prophet whose words were preserved in the form of a book. He prophesied in the Northern Kingdom of Israel between the years of 700. During the eighth century, Amos started preaching. He preached to Israel which provided a powerful prophetic witness for all ages because of his condemnation of the spiritual blindness. Amos forged an explicit and unbreakable link between justice toward the neighbor and righteousness before God. The covenant that was established at Mt. Sinai had been broken. It is through Jeremiah that God promises to renew his covenant relationship with his people. Amos ministry provides an eternal witness of God opposition to economic, political

Grandly hovering above the overall squalor and desolation of the country were the privileged classes of the new kingdom, who lived like parasites off the land and the people. The tendency was for them to take as much as they could