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From C-Span "Booknotes":
LAMB: You mention that you're a Christian, but you do in the book keep balancing the mention of Christianity with Judaism, the Judaic-Christian ethic. Why are the two mixed? And if I were a Buddhist or an Islamic follower or something like that, why aren't they included in a book like this?
OLASKY: Well, because the history, and what I tried to do was report on what I found in the stacks of the Library of Congress, and a lot of the groups were Protestants, some of the groups were Catholic, there were Jewish groups involved also -- United Hebrew Charities in New York. And one thing I found surprising, actually, was that they did pretty much the same thing. Even though there are significant theological differences, when it came down to the practical applications, they all thought of people created in the image of God, they all emphasized basic approaches of affiliation, thinking of people in terms of families and bonding, trying to actually set up a one-to-one relationship between a person who needs help and a volunteer capable of helping.
They weren't afraid to categorize people by values and seeing whether a person really wanted to work or did not want to work or was really interested in helping his family or was just interested in roaming around. They tried to be discerning in their giving. They all understood that the key thing was not just to give and have a warm, fuzzy feeling, but to give in a way that was effective. So regardless of the particular orientation, that's what they shared. I mean, they share an emphasis on employment, on having people find work. They share an emphasis on freedom, on trying to avoid certain restrictions that would take away the bottom rungs of the ladder and keep people from rising up. They all had a belief in a God who's sovereign.
Again, the different understandings of God, but nevertheless, there was the commonality, and when it came out in terms of people was that people have value, are not just material, people have spiritual sides. So that Protestantism and Catholicism and Judaism all had in common for the most part. Now today, you have big Buddhist and Islamic influences, but those were not there in the late 19th century, which I was concentrating on, and so I didn't discuss those. |
