Editorial May 8, 1989 Issue

How's your philanthropy?

Allison W. Phinney, Jr.

It's a term that has a touch of the old-fashioned. Maybe it seems a rather high-flown word for charitable giving. But when I was reading recently about a monk in Sri Lanka, philanthropy was the term that came to thought.^{see Lloyd Timberlake, Only One Earth: Living for the Future (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1987), pp. 41–60. (Interestingly, these particular comments were accompanied by a gift of $500 to a fund commemorating Baron and Baroness de Hirsch, noted philanthropists of that time. A lengthy though incomplete listing of Mrs. Eddy's other charitable gifts can be found on page 468 of Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority by Robert Peel [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977].)}

The article told of how a monk had been sent to a remote village where, in the ordinary routine of things, he would have built a temple and taken the lead in directing the people's religious affairs. He found, however, that families in the village were suffering severely from malnutrition and illness.

They owned no property of their own. They lived in mud huts and were wiped out each year in flood season. There were no wells, and no roads to the village. Only two families had milk to drink with any frequency. Only two had lavatories.

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