Shrewd Samaritan, Bruce Wydick
Shrewd Samaritan, Bruce Wydick
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Shrewd Samaritan
Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor

Author: Bruce Wydick

Narrator: Mike Terry

Unabridged: 9 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Published: 07/09/2019

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

Learn to live the message of the Good Samaritan and make a global impact, using the resources already at your disposal.If there were a popularity contest among all the parables of Jesus, the Good Samaritan would probably win. Nobody is against the Good Samaritan because being against the Good Samaritan is like being against Mother Theresa or Oskar Schindler or the firefighters who ran into the World Trade Center. In that same popularity contest, the Shrewd Manager would probably finish last. The Shrewd Manager is lazy, deceitful, and double-crossing. Yet in this alluringly freakish parable, Jesus actually holds up the Shrewd Manager as an example, as he does with the Good Samaritan. This audiobook is about learning to live the message of the Good Samaritan in the context of the globalized world of the twenty-first century. This means learning to love our global neighbor wisely by harnessing the resources at our disposal—our time, talents, opportunities, and money—on behalf of those who are victims of injustice, disease, violence, and poverty.The early disciples were pretty clueless about worldly resources such as time, talent, and money—and unfortunately today we still don’t really get it. There are too many kind, well-intentioned twenty-first-century people with indisputably good intentions but whose impact on the needy is hampered by their inability to diagnose problems properly, harness the resources available to them to solve the right problems, and understand cause-and-effect relationships. Shrewd Samaritan will help develop a framework to better love and care for our neighbors in an age of globalization, when the people in our neighborhoods, or at least those in our potential sphere of influence, has expanded dramatically. Increasingly it will become our global neighbor who takes us out of our comfort zone and challenges us with the needs of a broken world. Charts, notes, and study guide are available in the audiobook companion PDF download.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Luke

It feels ungrateful to be irritated at Wydick for not pushing far enough towards the importance of impact in making decisions about to help others. He’s definitely trying to push Christians to be more thoughtful in their charity, and overall the book probably does that. But I think he doesn’t push f......more

Goodreads review by Ezeozue

Sometimes Shrewd Samaritan reads like a solid piece of economic writing especially when it discusses the merits of various kinds of interventions but then it gets a little wishy-washy including, for instance, when the author goes through a personal anecdote from his college days. There are also time......more

Things I liked: - clear list and three dimensional ranking of 20 types of charity-related interventions around the world. - criticism of effective altruism for avoiding elements of dignity - clearly outline dilemas between donating effectively to the “invisible” poor abroad, and helping the poor in yo......more

Goodreads review by Jeff

This is a very excellent book. The author goes through many of the charitable causes that are at work in foreign countries and discusses and explains how effective they are. He comes at things from an economic and religious perspective which is very cool and helpful. I highly recommend this book and......more