The Philanthropic Enterprise

By Richard B. Gunderman

What is our image of philanthropy? It is a question worth pondering, because our philanthropic practice is powerfully informed by our philanthropic aspirations.

Superphilanthropy

By Max Borders

Will the ties of community based on mutual need continue to fray thanks to centralized charity (welfare) and the comfort of the coming plenty? Or will abundance lower the costs of each of us to become a superphilanthropist?

Transparent Charity

By Lenore Ealy

In a May column at Forbes, Alex Chafuen discusses John Tyler’s 2013 publication “Transparency in Philanthropy” by way of Renaissance Florence and the work of the “Good men of San Martino” the Buonomini of San Martino, a brotherhood founded in 1441.

Markets, Entitlement and The Ethos of Modern Philanthropy

By Lenore Ealy

Writing in The Public Discourse last week (A Moral Foundation for Entitlement Reform), Adam MacLeod proposes that charity forms sympathetic bonds between donors and their recipients in ways that government entitlement payments cannot: Acts of sharing and exchange within the family establish moral connections.

Invisible Gnomes and Visible Samaritans

By Lenore Ealy

Mises Daily has posted a wonderful explication by Paul Cantor of the libertarian themes in the politically incorrect television show South Park.

Making Wholeness

By Lenore Ealy

In this lovely essay, Nikos Salingaros observes: Rarely do we find a person today who is a creator, who works with materials with his or her own hands to develop an object, in order to release a form from the formless material, who dares to imitate the divine act that creates order from disorder.

Surveyors, Farmers, Industrialists, and Democrats

By Lenore Ealy

At Philanthropy Daily I ponder the tensions of modern agrarianism… In his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, agrarian belle lettrist Wendell Berry indicts corporate industrialism for its role in the degradation of land communities and land-use economies and not so subtly hints that American philanthropy was an outgrowth of this degradation….