Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

Co-Chair, Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

Joining the #EAD2019 Saturday late morning panel discussion is The Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis. Rev Theoharis is Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. She is the Co-Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice and a Founder and the Coordinator of the Poverty Initiative.

She has spent the past two decades organizing among the poor in the United States, working with and advising grassroots organizations with significant victories including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Vermont Workers Center, Domestic Workers United, the National Union of the Homeless and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union. She has led hundreds of trainings, Bible studies, and leadership development workshops; spoken at dozens of conferences and keynote presentations across the US and globally; and published several articles and book chapters sharing her vision that poverty can be ended and that the poor can be agents of social change.

Liz received her BA in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania; her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in 2004 where she was the first William Sloane Coffin Scholar; and her PhD from Union in New Testament and Christian Origins. She has been published in Time Magazine, The Guardian, Sojourners, The Nation, The Christian Century, and others. She was named one of the Politico 50 of “thinkers, doers and visionaries whose ideas are driving politics” in 2018.

Liz is the author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor (Eerdmans, 2017). She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).