In my recent post on neighborliness, I quoted from a sermon by Helmut Thielicke, and I want to return to one passage from that sermon: 

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God's tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God's help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path. 

It strikes me that it is just this kind of surprise that the Effective altruism (EA) movement is determined to avoid. It’s a movement that puts givers in complete control: they rationally calculate how much to give and to whom, and are on principle unmoved by other considerations. 

My hero Paul Farmer used to say that as generous as WLs (White Liberals) can be, they tend to believe that the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves. If that’s true, then the difference between the WLs and the EAs is that the latter think the world can be repaired at no cost to themselves in anything other than money.

For an alternative model, I would suggest that everyone read this long and deeply moving story about an active, overflowing love that does not count costs — that gives all it has without calculation — that is wholly human-hearted.