Book Reviews

health and education resulting from structural adjustment in sub-Saharan African countries as governments, under the prodding of the World Bank and the IMF, adopt a free-market approach.On a different continent, the over-reliance on the Urban Neighborhood Committee in China for the delivery of community welfare has ironic parallels with excessive dependence on local faith-based agencies in the United States, which Wineburg analyzes so perceptively.These are all cases where government legislators and bureaucrats overlook or choose to ignore the consequences of their actions.Devolution to local authorities can also be a budget-cutting device, and it is often mainly that, where NGOs, community organizations and voluntary agencies, whether faith-based or not, are expected to take up the slack.A Limited Partnership concentrates on religious agencies and organizations that are called upon to offer services ranging from soup kitchens to legal assistance in North Carolina.Some of these services are professional, such as family counseling and drug rehabilitation, and others are more generic, but still costly and labor-intensive, such as meals-on-wheels, child care, adult day care and emergency food assistance.The trouble is that the religious system is not set up to offer all of these professional services, and has not the resources to deal both with emergencies and the ongoing delivery of welfare services.The US government, for its part, has increasingly shrugged off its institutional responsibilities under different guises and with diverse explanations: Ronald Reagan's preference for private enterprise when stereotyping and ridiculing `the Welfare Queen', George H. Bush's emphasis on voluntary faith-based services (his `Thousand Points of Light'), and Bill Clinton's call for `the end of welfare as we know it', legislated as welfare reform.To each his own ideology, but in the last analysis there is a common thread of cost-saving and curtailment of ®nancial support and service to welfare clients.While Wineburg criticizes the implementation of government policy, he in no way short-changes the contribution that religious organizations are providing and can further offer in the service of local communities.He endorses their efforts and documents their potential.Rather his thesis in the broadest sense, summed up in the book's title, is this: there is room for a partnership between churches, synagogues and mosques, on the one hand, and government and its agencies, on the other, but it must be a limited one without demanding from religious organizations what they are incapable of providing.In this particular time when issues of faith and state have come to the front of the world stage, A Limited Partnership suggests all sorts of lessons.

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