Abstract

Notions of poverty and impoverishment are often filled with value-loaded connotations, and identified with deprivation both as a state and as a process. In this paper, we would like to show that poverty reveals itself not only as lack or scarcity but also as a totality of positive practices, attributes and strategies on individual as well as on group level. The study employs the Christian understanding of poverty to argue that the surpluses are of different nature and are interconnected with various types of deficits, constituting a complex network which equally affects material, moral, social, and spiritual dimensions. Our objective here is to outline certain aspects of a theory that aims at a new concept of “poverty” and “impoverishment”, which will enable us to include both the positive and negative individual and communal states and motions described in Christian tradition and the negative states and motions constituting the object of deficit-centered theories of poverty.