In this episode of The Stakes, host Brad Rourke sits down with Kettering Foundation Senior Fellow Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. As a draft federal budget that slashes healthcare, guts Medicaid, and sidelines working families advances, Barber lays bare the moral stakes at play. 

Barber is bringing Moral Mondays to Washington, DC—a monthly public reckoning with the budget as a moral document. He calls on clergy and everyday Americans to rise in nonviolent protest, naming a deeper agenda at work: “What they’re trying to do is use the budget to dysfunction the government. . . . [T]his budget is destructive; it’s deadly and it’s disempowering.” 

With clarity, Barber urges us to see how budgets reveal the soul of a nation.