Anthropologist and author Jason Hickel swiftly disabused readers of a narrative offered by Microsoft founder Bill Gates this week, rejecting the billionaire's statement on Twitter that "people underestimate just how much life has improved over the last two centuries."
The idea that the free-market capitalism has grown while solving the crisis of extreme poverty around the world may be tempting for some to embrace, Hickel wrote in the Guardian—but it is "completely wrong."...….


"Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite," Hickel wrote. "Only five percent of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60 percent—and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years ago. It is madness—and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it."

On a recent Sunday in church, the officiating priest invited us (as he does every Sunday) to pray. We prayed for those you might call the “usual suspects”: for the bishop, for those in positions of political authority, for the recently departed.
But among those we also prayed for was “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – and for all the other saints … ”...

If you’re looking for more politically loaded saints, the online handcraft marketplace Etsy has plenty of sellers hawking “progressive saint” candles depicting St. Barack Obama, St. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Robert Mueller and even “Notorious” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, heralded as the “angel of everlasting dissent.”