Sunday, February 6

Charity and the Institutions of Man (Rewind)

Well, on my charity project, I had tried to break up the task of clarifying our personal and institutional call to perform charity. In that I had tried breaking the question up into four questions (see this). For the first essay this worked. Which just meant, the question of who we should be owe charity can be addressed. As I worked on essays on the next question, I encountered difficulty. The questions What, When, and From Whom did not seem well posed, in that while trying to consider the first question I found myself answering parts of the other questions. These questions were not orthogonal. Which meant, it is better to rethink my categories than push on. So, here is another proposal:
In working on an essay for What, I did manage to glean a little more insight, and plan to go ahead with the following "breakdown" for this project. This time I will attempt to break the problem down by the types of charity we apply, to whit:
  • Immediate By this I mean, those requiring immediate short term assistance in response to some sort of catastrophe
  • Chronic for those requiring long term assistance.
  • Incidental showing charity to those neighbors we meet in an by happenstance or chance meeting.


Hopefully with this breakdown I may be able to get further in developing a treatment of charity and how its demands might be met either by personal and institutional commitments.