University of Mary Washington Associate Professor of Economics Shawn Humphrey will be featured on the radio program With Good Reason beginning Saturday, Jan. 9. A segment with Emile Lester, associate professor of political science and international affairs, also will re-air.
In the episode “Predicting War,” Humphrey will share his experience with fighting poverty through charitable efforts in Honduras, which he has learned is a complex process that requires constant humility – contrary to the popular one-for-one business models that exist today.
The founder of the Two Dollar Challenge, Month of Microfinance, Poverty Action Conference and La Ceiba Microfinance, Humphrey solves poverty through a focus on partnerships and long-lasting change in developing countries. He shares his thoughts on poverty in his blog, Blue Collar Professor. Humphrey also serves on the Board of Directors of Students Helping Honduras, is a former Clinton Global Initiative University mentor and is an Opportunity Collaboration alumnus.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen.
First aired in spring 2015, the episode “Secrecy in the ‘Sunshine Era’” features Lester’s work in reviewing history textbooks approved by the Board of Education in Texas that a commission of experts claimed were pushing a specific ideology. Lester was one of three faculty scholars asked by a Texas watchdog agency to review the textbooks. He discovered that the textbooks were not only misleading, but were false.
Lester is the author of “Teaching About Religions: A Democratic Approach for Public Schools,” served on the Newseum panel, “Does GOD Make a Difference? Taking religion seriously in schools and universities” and was a featured panelist at the “God in American National Symposium on Religious Literacy” hosted by PBS and the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life. He also participated in a national symposium “Public Schools, Religion, and the First Amendment” in New York to promote conversation on how public schools, religion, and the First Amendment intersect.
