The LDS church has urged compassion and provided aid for refugees in the Middle East for more than a decade.
If Mother Teresa, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her charitable work with the poor and the sick, embodies the old way of treating social problems (compassion and Band-Aids), then big thinking, solution-minded pragmatists like Mr. Schramm represent the new.
New research discovers a disturbing psychological tendency: people felt less compassion and donated less aid to a large group of people than to a small group, less aid to a pair of victims than to either individual alone... the problem is that action on our part depends upon feelings of compassion that may be hard to arouse and sustain over time, for large numbers of victims.
When the cardinal speaks with compassion about aid and comfort to unfortunates, he is right on target, but when he moves out of his realm to border security, his words ring hollow.
At the time of the study interview 46 patients had explicitly requested aid in dying from a physician and 47 had contacted Compassion and Choices to obtain aid in dying.
22 Once enrolled, participants confirmed that they had expressed interest in obtaining aid in dying through Compassion and Choices or explicitly requested aid in dying from a physician.
In California, most do, said Matt Whitaker, state director of Compassion and Choices, the leading aid-in-dying advocacy group.
A few years ago, inspired by compassion and a biblical mandate to aid "widows and orphans," the couple adopted two teenage boys and a young girl from Ethiopia.
But that spirit of solidarity and mutual aid, of compassion and confidence in each other, is the best expression of ourselves.
We believe that together we can create change, foster compassion and be proactive about getting aid to those in need and, in whatever small way, help provide better, safer, fairer lives for millions of people.
"With huge shortages of funding and wide gaps in the global regime for protecting victims of war, people in need of compassion, aid and refuge are being abandoned," he said.
