Putting a Human Face on the Minimum Wage

What is a “livable wage,” and should we strive to raise wages for American workers? There are lots of conflicting studies and reports. The Congressional Budget Office projects that an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to$10.10 an hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs while raising the incomes of nearly 17 million Americans. Even prominent economists like David Card and David Neumark diametrically disagree on the likely consequences of raising the minimum wage, and their studies of results in New Jersey have consistently yielded conflicting results for decades. [excerpt

Want to Honor Vets this Memorial Day? Help End Veterans\u27 Homelessness

Memorial Day is a day for remembering the men and women who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. As we gather around the grill with loved ones, let\u27s also remember veterans who survived their term of service only to find themselves without a place of their own to celebrate holidays. When I first began grappling with homelessness in my local community years ago, Dave, then the director of the local homeless shelter in our small town, told me a story which illustrates some of the special circumstances faced by homeless veterans in America. [excerpt

Embracing Immigrants is a Religious Imperative

I’m an English professor, and in leftist intellectual circles it’s often considered somewhat unsophisticated and definitely uncool to argue in favor of traditional religious beliefs. However, as the clerk of a tiny Quaker Meeting in a farming community in rural Pennsylvania, I feel led to do so in the context of the debate about immigration. I would submit that Scripture is explicit in its requirement that we accept and embrace the immigrants in our midst, and note that Leviticus (19:34) makes no mention of legal status. (excerpt

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Died Today. Or, Maybe, Yesterday; I Can\u27t Be Sure...

50 years on, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead continues to captivate and to entertain audiences with its darkly comic examination of existential themes of life, death, and indecision drawn from the pages, situations, and characters of Hamlet. First produced at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966, the play opened at the Old Vic in London in 1967, and has been reprised there this season to rave reviews, with none other than Harry Potter in a leading role

Bennequin type inequalities in lens spaces

We give criteria for an invariant of lens space links to bound the maximal self-linking number in certain tight contact lens spaces. As a corollary we extend the Franks-Williams-Morton inequality to the setting of lens spaces.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures; International Mathematics Research Notices 201

A Lost Generation

America is in immediate danger of throwing away a vast number of our young people; these are kids who have fallen through the gaping holes in our social services net and have landed on our streets. They roam this country by the thousands in search of simple necessities such as food and a warm place to sleep, often trading their bodies in exchange for the most basic of human rights. In the words of Michael Stoops, Director of Community Organizing at the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, DC, there is a dire need for more shelter beds for homeless youth. In fact, we are in danger of producing another Lost Generation, and the process is fueled by our own apathy, neglect, and lack of decisive action. Furthermore, it is a damning testimony of abiding intolerance in our society that LGBT young people are wildly disproportionally represented among homeless youth in America. [excerpt

Yes, Gettysburg C.A.R.E.S.

Founded in the autumn of 2012, Gettysburg C.A.R.E.S. is a collaborative effort by local churches and citizens to provide emergency shelter to those without housing of any kind during the winter months. [excerpt