Cause for concern
Radcliffe Fellow Erica Caple James, M.T.S. ’95, Ph.D. ’03, is a Harvard-trained medical and psychiatric anthropologist. In the mid-’90s, she was studying rehabilitation programs for post-conflict rape and torture victims in Haiti. Then another kind of research caught her eye: the dark side of charity, a human endeavor you might not think has one. After all, said James in a lecture this week, Christians — for one — believe that charity is “a spiritual state in which one extends love, empathy, and compassion toward others without judgment.” Charity is also both “a sentiment and an action,” and allows moral values to take on a physical expression, said James, a one-time divinity student. But she discovered that the moral imperative of giving sometimes clashes with the mechanisms of giving, she said. When faith-based organizations become “the apparatuses of governmental security and policing,” these organizations get caught between “the poles of compassion and repression.” James —...