Mendicant poverty is doing rather poorly in scholarship of theology and religious studies over the last decade or so. Kenneth Baxter Wolf’s The Poverty of Riches (2003)questioned whether the voluntary poverty of St. Francis of Assisi had perhaps the counter-intuitive effect of distracting attention from the involuntarily poor. Francis, the icon of self-emptying humility, emerges in Wolf’s treatment as a particularly destructive instance of the privileged class’s well-meaning penchant for “slumming.” Leggi tutto »
