The Chronicle of Philanthropy:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy have announced they will support a new study called “The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
The study will try to determine how and why wealthy people donate to charity, with the aim of getting them to give more. It will include only people worth more than $25-million and will focus on people worth more than $100-million.
The study aims to get beyond platitudes about how the wealthy give — that they want to shore up their legacy, for instance.
You ask the wealthy why they give. You write down what they say. You create tables. You make generalizations. Does anyone apply to the self-reports of extreme wealth the kind of attention that Browning devoted to the Bishop in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxides? Could it be that the rich are no less mystified than the rest of us, no less self-aware, no less self-deceived, but subject to much greater temptations? As a Latter Day Hellenistic Philosopher operating from a Dumpster in Dallas, without any subsidy from Bill Gates, my goal is not to study the consciousness of the super-wealthy, and to report my results in the Wall Street Journal, but to heal the disease of which that consciousness is the symptom. Metanoia, as Dr. Paul Shervish, the researcher who will conduct this study knows as a former Jesuit, means mind shift in Greek, but is translated in the Bible as "repentence." As Paul takes the confessions of the these wealthy people, I hope he remembers the cure of souls. Uncritical attention can corrupt.
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