Readings (1 July 2014)

Let Them Eat Cash, from the New York Times. Though many people think that simply giving the poor cash won’t help them,

Globally, cash is a major tool to fight extreme poverty. The United Nations is handing out ATM cards to Syrian refugees alongside sacks of grain. The evidence suggests these cash programs work. There have been randomized trials of cash grants to poor Mexican families, Kenyan villagers, Malawian schoolgirls and many others. The results show that sometimes people just eat better or live in better homes. Often, though, they start businesses and earn more.

Whether this will help the homeless in New York City he doesn’t know, but thinks it might, and asks us “to be skeptical of stereotypes of those we purport to help.”

Church Bells Fall Silent in Mosul as Iraq’s Christians Flee, by Drew Bowling and Andreas Dorin, from The Daily Beast. A story with which most readers will be familiar.

Since 2003, Christians have been fleeing to Kurdistan’s Nineveh plain. The Sunni Kurds, who tend to be secular in their politics, have offered them a helping hand in recent years.

As the horrors unfolded in Iraq, back in Washington, in the briefing room of a presidential hopeful, an Iraqi bishop made a desperate plea for help via phone as a delegation of Iraqi Christians seeking greater support for the Kurds. “We have no food, no petrol, no [means] to protect ourselves. Where are America’s values? Where is our dignity?” Many in Washington are keen to see greater Kurdish autonomy, viewing them as the prudent third way between the Sunni states that have supported Islamist militants (Turkey, Saudi, Qatar) and Shia Iran and its puppets. The Kurds represent not only the best hope for an American ally in an increasingly Islamist-dominated region, but also the best hope for the survival of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

Atheist Convert R. J. Stove, by R. J. Stove. The son of the prominent Australian atheist philosopher describes his discovery that God exists and his entry into the Catholic Church. The story was published three years ago but I just saw it, so pass it on. Among its lessons:

When I was ten years old we actually found ourselves living next to a convent. Members of a German order, the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary, built a religious house next to ours. Improbably enough in view of the above, my parents came to adore them. At considerable physical risk to himself, Dad would every year climb his own pine trees and chop off branches of them, so that they could be used as Christmas trees at the convent.

More and more my parents’ theoretical opposition to Catholicism became modified by such considerations as “Oh, of course, when we say Catholics are the enemies of free thought, we don’t mean you.” The sheer goodness- in-action (this is the least cumbersome description I can come up with) of the Schoenstatt Sisters modified not only my parents’ prejudices, but mine. Nevertheless my father certainly, and my mother probably, would have thought it grotesque in those days to believe that the nuns’ goodness had anything to do with their faith. No, somehow the nuns were gooddespite their faith. They presented to my father the same unlikely spectacle as an improbably obliging communist, or an improbably obliging telephone-vandal.