"Better Than Gold: The Moral Biography of Charitable Giving."
Paul G. Schervish. ALDE Conference Presentation. Delivered as a keynote
presentation at the 2003 California Dreamin' Conference in Irvine, California.
This presentation focuses on the addition of a third key component for fundraising
in congregations in addition to the traditional mission-based and spirituality-based
approaches. The mission-based model of stewardship identifies congregational
needs and invites the congregation to contribute to meet those needs. The spirituality-based
model asks individuals to reflect upon their relationship to God and to develop
their inclination to become sacrificial givers to serve God's needs rather than
only meeting particular needs in the church. Although each of these models serve
their own vital role, a third model that considers the needs of the donating
member is of equal importance. I suggest the voluntary contribution of financial
gifts will be most highly motivated and productive where we find the confluence
of meeting the needs of the congregation, God, and the donor - what Thomas Aquinas
describes as the unity of love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self. I
discuss three important aspects of the needs of donors that should be taken
into account in stewardship efforts. The first aspect is the notion that charitable
giving is a practice that helps constitute an individual's life as a moral biography.
The second aspect is the increasing material capacity that is increasingly forming
the basis for growth in charitable giving. And finally, the third aspect is
the notion that working with the inclinations of donors through a self-reflective
process of discernment will make charitable giving more meaningful and more
abundant.
"The Boston Area Diary Study and the Moral Citizenship of Care."
Paul G. Schervish and John J. Havens. Voluntas: International Journal of
Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations. Vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 47-71. March 2002.
This paper describes the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical
implications of what we call the moral citizenship or moral economy of care.
In particular, we present an identification model of care; discuss how it shaped
the way we conceptualized, collected, and analyzed the data in our year-long
diary study of daily voluntary assistance; and suggest that when civic engagement
is properly defined and measured there may in fact be no deterioration in the
physical or moral density of associational life as is suggested by many contemporary
commentators.
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"By Their Fruits, Shall We Know Them?: Comparing Philosophy
of Giving to Actual Behavior."
Laura M. Leming and John J. Havens. Presented at the 1998 annual meeting
of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action,
Seattle. Nov. 5-7, 1998.
This paper is an extension of the analysis of Boston College Social Welfare
Research Institute "Boston Area Diary Study" (BADS) wherein participants
were interviewed weekly for a year about their charitable giving and volunteering.
The study provides a unique opportunity to compare respondents' answers to four
open-ended questions about their philosophy of giving with their actual contributions
of time and money. This paper reports the qualitative analysis of this comparison.
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