By Vanessa Hulse
Staff Writer
Dr. Chris Stanley, a theology professor, works as a coordinator for the monthly faculty/staff day at the Warming House. Stanley has been involved with the Warming House for a total of almost 18 years. Around three or four years ago, he began coordinating the faculty/staff day.
He said he began volunteering many years ago at a church in St. Louis and ever since then has continued to serve the poor, marginalized, and those considered to be at the bottom of society.
He attributes his first urge to begin service due to his background as an evangelical Christian.
However, what eventually helped him to make the push to begin serving were two books by Ron Sider called “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger” and “Cry Justice.”
In the first title, he said “Sider included a lot of statistics about hunger, need and poverty.” The second book “is simply collections of biblical verses dealing with social justice and poverty.”
Stanley says that for him, someone who takes the Bible very seriously, this had an enormous impact on him to make a change in his life.
Stanley also mentioned that it was through this volunteering in various communities, through “the hands-on experiences in the communities that I just came to see that there was a whole world of human experiences that I had been oblivious to.”
For him these experiences, “Humanized poverty and it humanized the experience of people who are marginalized and at the bottom of our society.”
In addition to this, he said, “It’s one thing to read about it in books, but when you actually spend time with people in the communities, whether it’s an inner-city black community in East St. Louis or whether it’s working at the Warming House here, you get a sense that this isn’t just a bunch of lazy people who don’t deserve help, or that you need to sort out between the deserving and undeserving poor.”
His experiences volunteering have helped him become non-judgmental toward those who live in poverty.
For Stanley, the main point he advocates for when discussing the idea of poverty is that the people who live in poverty are still people. He mentioned several times that the biggest change he could see in his life was the humanization of those who live in poverty.
For anyone looking for more information on the faculty/staff day or volunteering during the monthly faculty/staff day that occurs once a month, please contact Dr. Chris Stanley by email at cstanley@sbu.edu or by phone at 716-372-4232.
hulseva13@bonaventure.edu
