The Director of an ecumenical Christian charity of my fond acquaintance for some five years explains why it didn’t do “Giving Tuesday” this year by quoting Wendell Berry:
We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams.
The first duty of writers who wish to be of any use even to themselves is to resist the language, the ideas, and the categories of this ubiquitous sales talk, no matter from whose mouth it issues. But, then, this is also the first duty of everybody else.
As I regularly support them already, this won’t elicit a special one-time gift, but it’s tempting.
(Eighth Day Institute Membership, Membership Flyer Insert Sep 2020 - Membership Flyer Insert Sep 2020.pdf)