Word: allen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...poverty may be over, its soldiers in disarray and retreat, but the Rev. Floyd Flake, who is a departing member of Congress, seems not to have got the news. Flake's Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church in Queens, N.Y., with 9,000 members and a towering new $23 million cathedral, operates a government-funded social-services network that would be the envy of many municipal governments. The church's 30,000-sq.-ft. social-services center houses a city-funded walk-in clinic and federal Head Start classrooms at street level. On the center's second floor are a city...
What's more remarkable, all this is only a small part of an Allen A.M.E. antipoverty empire that sprawls across a 26-block stretch of southeastern Queens. To stroll the neighborhood is to see how much can be done when Caesar begins to render unto the church. Allen A.M.E. has used federal funds to provide the community's elderly with 300 subsidized apartments in the Allen Senior Citizens Housing Complex, along with meals and recreational activities. It has transformed abandoned city-owned lots and state mortgage subsidies into 50 affordable suburban-style two-family homes. Down the street from...
...future of America's antipoverty efforts may look a lot like Allen A.M.E. As the nation wrestles with how to reform a failed welfare system, and as more than 35 million Americans continue to live below the poverty line, government is increasingly asking churches to succeed where social workers and bureaucrats handing out checks have failed. State and local welfare departments are starting up innovative partnerships with religious institutions. And a little-noticed provision in last year's welfare-reform law called "charitable choice" has opened the door for the nation's 260,000 religious congregations to take...
...churches, there are two advantages to the new laws. They no longer have to set up secular arms, like Allen A.M.E.'s 11 nonprofit corporations or the Roman Catholic Church's Catholic Charities, to operate government-funded programs. Nor must they strip these programs of religiosity--cover religious symbols or remove evangelical tracts from waiting rooms--to participate. To its proponents, charitable choice is simply about treating churches equally. "Just because an organization has a cross hanging in its window doesn't mean we should discriminate against it and prevent it from helping people," says Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma...
DIED. WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, 83, novelist, cult figure and perhaps the most audacious member of a Beat Generation trinity whose two other divinities were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; after a heart attack; in Lawrence, Kans. Burrough's groundbreaking novel Naked Lunch, first published in Paris in 1959, was both praised as a work of genius and denounced as incomprehensible garbage and pornography. His life was as extreme as the experimental fiction he pioneered, involving alcohol, heroin, homosexuality, a celebrated obscenity trial in Boston and, in 1951, his accidental killing of his wife while shooting a glass...