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Monday, April 21, 2025

Andy Pope

Andy Pope is a freelance writer currently residing in Moscow, Idaho. His unique perspective has been published on FāVS News throughout the past five years, as well as on Classism Exposed, Berkeleyside, Street Spirit News, U.U. Class Conversations and Religion Unplugged. An accomplished pianist and lifelong musical theatre person, Andy is also the author of "Eden in Babylon," a musical about youth homelessness in urban America. He recently started a new YouTube Channel, which you can find here.

My Journey through Homelessness Part Five: Learning to Live Outside the Box

The value of my homeless experience lies not so much in having learned how to live outside — at least not in the geographical sense. The value of my homeless experience lies in having learned how to live outside the box.

A Call to Spiritual Action that Should Lead to ‘Ceasefire Now’

Would a person of such decency respond to the atrocities in Gaza by declaring that the Lord is coming soon? Of course not! It’s insensitive as well as biblically flawed. We should be deeply concerned about the murders of thousands of Palestinian civilians. We should not exploit these horrors as an opportunity to declare that Jesus is on his way.

My Journey through Homelessness Part Four: Body Armor

We need to stop mandating people who live outside to housing in situations they would not choose of their own free will. We need to stop focusing on “getting them housed” and start accepting that people have a right to sleep outside on public land, and that homelessness may well be here to stay. 

My Journey through Homelessness Part Three: A New Pair of Glasses

Andy Pope writes how his point of view evolved from someone who lived inside most of his life to someone who lived outside for 12 years to someone who began to live on the inside again. Each season, he wore a unique pair of glasses through which he saw the world.

Treasures in Heaven

Scripture continually warns us against showing preference to the wealthy. (James 2:2-4) Yet the less-heralded “ism” known as classism runs rampant throughout American Christianity. Nowhere is its presence more glaring than in the so-called Prosperity Gospel.

Classism, Stigma and Long-Distance Running

The criminalization of the poor is a real phenomenon. Impoverished people in our society are not only criminalized by those who are well-off. We are criminalized by some of the very poor people we find in our midst.

My Journey through Homelessness Part Two: A Prayer that Released Me from Shame

I mentioned that on July 17, 2016, I prayed fervently to be released from years of demeaning homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. I also reported that ten days later, on July 27, 2016, I stepped off a bus in Moscow, Idaho, and have been inside ever since. So how did this remarkable change of circumstance come to pass?

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