Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it's an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.
It really is quite remarkable that Darfur has become a household name. I am gratified that's the case.
While Americans have heard of Darfur and think we should be doing more there, they aren't actually angry at the president about inaction.
The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month.
The news media's silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.
We all might ask ourselves why we tune in to these more trivial matters and tune out when it comes to Darfur.
Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.
Remember that disadvantage is less about income than environment. The best metrics of child poverty aren't monetary, but rather how often a child is read to or hugged.
Why are fanatics so terrified of girls' education? Because there's no force more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.
Every high school and college graduate in America should, I think, have some familiarity with statistics, economics and a foreign language such as Spanish. Religion may not be as indispensable, but the humanities should be a part of our repertory. They may not enrich our wallets, but they do enrich our lives. They civilize us. They provide context.
The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.
One of the things that evangelicals do really, really well is to make giving a joyous, social enterprise. Too often, the world sees giving as a burden, a sacrifice, when in fact it's more like an opportunity to help others and oneself at the same time.
Worrying about bills, food, or other problems leaves less capacity to think ahead or to exert self-discipline. So, poverty imposes a mental tax.
The great divide is not between faiths, but one between intolerant zealots of any tradition and the large numbers of decent, peaceful believers likewise found in each tradition.
One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.
When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.
I think humanitarians really feel very awkward and embarrassed about marketing, but it really doesn't matter whether a shampoo gets better marketing. It does matter when a famine or a huge crisis is - oh - well, I hate to use the word 'marketed' better but, you know, is publicized in a way that will be more effective.
Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.
When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.
