Poverty by Choice

A Word in Season: Messages by R.J. Rushdoony on the Faith for All of Life · May 17, 2026 · 2m

I have before me a treasured book first published in 1875, written by one of America’s great Christian educators. Recently, while lecturing at an Ivy League law school, I met his great-grandson a pleasant young man dressed like a semi-hippie who admitted that he and his brother went to great lengths to conceal their relationship to this remarkable ancestor, a former university president known for his Christian orthodoxy and strong American conservatism. Though heir to a rich spiritual and cultural legacy, he had cut himself off from it and chosen to be “poor” in spirit. This, tragically, is…