"Financial and Psychological Determinants of Donor’s
Capacity to Give."
Thomas B. Murphy, The T. B. Murphy Foundation Charitable Trust. In New Directions
in Philanthropic Fundraising. Understanding the Needs of Donors: The Supply-Side
of Charitable Giving. Edited by Eugene R. Tempel and Dwight F. Burlingame. Number
28, fall 2001, pp.33-49.
The basic tenet of this paper is that "the primary financial decision-making
criterion for determining one’s capacity to engage in philanthropic activities
is neither wealth nor income but the expected present and future relationship
between income and expense."
Given the generally accepted assumption that one provides first for oneself
and one’s family and does so at some level of lifestyle, philanthropy
enters into the decision-making process when the difference between the expected
level of income, present and future, and expected level of expense, present
and future, to maintain and enhance one’s standard of living is substantial
and relatively permanent as measured by the subjectively determined criteria
of the decision maker. It is from this difference that the financial wherewithal
for financial activities emerges.
"Financial Resources and Charitable Contributions of Retired Households"
Retired households, on average, own 58% more wealth but earn 35% less income
than non-retired households. On average they also contribute substantially more
(69%) to charitable causes than do non-retired households.
...more
"Finding God in Some Things: Unintended Consequences for
the Academy of the Faith That Does Justice."
Paul G. Schervish. Conversations: The National Seminar on Higher Education,
Number 19, Spring 2001:21-2.
Schervish is concerned that the implementation
of the Jesuit summons to a faith that does justice has, in higher education,
unintentionally done an injustice to the more fundamental invitation to find
God in all things. "I have no quarrel with the prayerfully adopted Jesuit
formulation linking faith and the practice of justice. Infusion of the faith
that does justice into the personal and academic vocation of the university
has been on balance salutary and transformative. I do argue, however, that too
narrow a focus on the meaning and practice of that injunction has impaired both
faith and justice. A one-sided emphasis on certain types of service has inoculated
those associated with the university from the full potency of the Ignatian prescriptions
of religious indifference, finding God in all things, and discernment."
