Overview
In a ringing call to churches, community leaders, and ordinary citizens, Marvin Olasky points the way to a reinvented War on Poverty and a renewal of faith-based charity. Only in recent decades have we relegated compassion to the government and lost touch with the poor. We can do much better. In Renewing American Compassion, Olasky reminds us that the original meaning of compassion is "suffering with": from this definition, he constructs an entirely new framework for helping the needy. Olasky shows how dozens of charities and individuals have connected to, and uplifted, the needy. He offers specific guidelines for offering a helping hand, and describes how true compassion renews all of us. He advocates the restoration of family and community bonds, and a return to a moral code that emphasizes the value of hard work, self-sufficiency, and self-respect. Olasky recounts dozens of success stories, and a summary of history's lessons, to show that through faith, by "suffering with," each of us can join a renewed effort for personal, challenging, and spiritual charity. He tells the stories of Clean and Sober Streets in Washington; Teen Challenge in San Antonio; Step Thirteen in Denver; Children of the Night in Los Angeles; and many others.Editorials
Ray Olson
Throughout this superb argument for replacing politically crafted, government-administered welfare with religiously informed service to the poor, Olasky stresses that compassion really means "suffering with." In the absorbing middle chapters, he demonstrates that this understanding of compassion animated what Americans called "charity" until the New Deal inaugurated the bureaucratized, impersonal, rigidly materialistic "social services" that many say now maintain rather than solve the problems of poverty. As in the past, so today, in the private religious agencies whose stories Olasky tells, "suffering with" involves making very personal investments of time and companionship (e.g., by taking an unwed mother to live in one's home). Such personal service is not, however, the only necessary component of successful welfare. Olasky says challenging people in crisis to do better for and by themselves and meeting their spiritual needs are the other two essentials that good faithbased welfare does as a matter of course but that government welfare won't and, because of federal court decisions, can't. There is even more hard substance to this densely informative little book that may come to be regarded as "the" conservative manifesto on welfare.Kirkus Reviews
Only the deserving poor should be helped, argues Olasky (Journalism/Univ. of Texas), as he makes the case for a return to 19th-century welfare strategies and "traditional American values."When President Franklin Pierce in 1854 vetoed mental health legislation inspired by Dorothea Dix's impassioned pleas, he argued that even worthwhile appropriations would push the federal government down a slippery slope and that "the foundations of charity will be dried up at home." For Olasky this event exemplifies the contrast between the true American values of neighborly charity noted by de Tocqueville and the very different movement toward federal welfare that triumphed in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Olasky sees the 19th century as an ideal era, at least insofar as private charities both helped individuals on a more personal level and challenged them to change. Most such charities had a religious basis. The author believes in shame as an important force to turn people toward hard work and self- sufficiency. The Puritan work ethic is prominent in these pages: Olasky explicitly bases his views on what he calls a "biblical" theology, which is in fact narrowly Calvinist, asserting human depravity and wary of universalism in any form. This book contains the usual stock themes of the present debate, with references to dependency and wasteful bureaucracy, but Olasky argues that welfare should not be left totally to the altruism of individuals. He is opposed to block grants, which could be misused, and he supports the move toward reducing the federal tax burden while at the same time raising state taxes for "social welfare purposes." One could be exempted from the state tax by giving the equivalent in cash or time to local poverty-fighting organizations.
A useful but not profound contribution to the current debate.