How Parents and Churches Can Close the Opportunity Gap
Churches and other religious groups can play an important role in reducing the opportunity gap between rich and poor kids in the United States, professor Robert Putnam said in an interview with The Christian Post about his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.
While churches already play an important role by promoting the importance of marriage, they can do more by getting involved in the lives of the poor children in crisis, explained Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010) with Notre Dame professor David Campbell, and the bestselling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).
In part one of his CP interview, Putnam spoke about the isolation from family, churches and community experienced by poor children, or the bottom one-third of all children in the United States, and he responded to comparisons made with Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012).
