A review of the socio-ethnic and religious contexts of the Samaritans points to the conclusion that they struggled to establish the legitimacy of their identity and status as a people.

The third installment in the CWA Dagger–winning series featuring Palestinian schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef. The Samaritan community in Palestine is tiny but ancient—only about six hundred people still adhere to this faith, an offshoot of Judaism, and now one of them has been murdered. The crime has even larger implications, though, as the dead man controlled hundreds of millions of dollars of government money. If the World Bank cannot locate it within the next several days, all aid to the Palestinians will be cut off. Visiting the isolated Samaritan community at Nablus in the West Bank, history teacher-turned-sleuth Omar Yussef must solve the murder and find the money for the sake of all Palestine.

Politics has become a synonym for all that is dirty, corrupt, dishonest, compromising, and wrong. For many people, politics seems not only remote from their daily lives but abhorrent to their personal values. Outside of the rare inspirational politician or social movement, politics is a wasteland of apathy and disinterest. It wasn't always this way. For Americans who came of age shortly after World War II, politics was a field of dreams. Democracy promised to cure the world's ills. But starting in the late seventies, conservative economists promoted self-interest as the source of all good, and their view became public policy. Government's main role was no longer to help people, but to get out of the way of personal ambition. Politics turned mean and citizens turned away. In this moving and powerful blend of political essay and reportage, award-winning political scientist Deborah Stone argues that democracy depends on altruism, not self-interest. The merchants of self-interest have divorced us from what we know in our pores: we care about other people and go out of our way to help them. Altruism is such a robust motive that we commonly lie, cheat, steal, and break laws to do right by others. "After 3:30, you're a private citizen," one home health aide told Stone, explaining why she was willing to risk her job to care for a man the government wanted to cut off from Medicare. The Samaritan's Dilemma calls on us to restore the public sphere as a place where citizens can fulfill their moral aspirations. If government helps the neighbors, citizens will once again want to help govern. With unforgettable stories of how real people think and feel when they practice kindness, Stone shows that everyday altruism is the premier school for citizenship. Helping others shows people their common humanity and their power to make a difference. At a time when millions of citizens ache to put the Bush and Reagan era behind us and feel proud of their government, Deborah Stone offers an enormously hopeful vision of politics.

What's wrong with foreign aid? Many policymakers, aid practitioners, and scholars have called into question its ability to increase economic growth, alleviate poverty, or promote social development. At the macro level, only tenuous links between development aid and improved living conditions have been found. At the micro level, only a few programs outlast donor support and even fewer appear to achieve lasting improvements. The authors of this book argue that much of aid's failure is related to the institutions that structure its delivery. These institutions govern the complex relationships between the main actors in the aid delivery system and often generate a series of perverse incentives that promote inefficient and unsustainable outcomes. In their analysis, the authors apply the theoretical insights of the new institutional economics to several settings. First, they investigate the institutions of Sida, the Swedish aid agency, to analyze how that aid agency's institutions can produce incentives inimical to desired outcomes, contrary to the desires of its own staff. Second, the authors use cases from India, a country with low aid dependence, and Zambia, a country with high aid dependence, to explore how institutions on the ground in recipient countries also mediate the effectiveness of aid. Throughout the book, the authors offer suggestions about how to improve aid's effectiveness. These suggestions include how to structure evaluations in order to improve outcomes, how to employ agency staff to gain from their on-the-ground experience, and how to engage stakeholders as "owners" in the design, resource mobilization, learning, and evaluation processes of development assistance programs.

The must-read summary of Deborah Stone's book: “The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help your Neighbor?”. This complete summary of "The Samaritan's Dilemma" by Deborah Stone, an award-winning political scientist, presents her argument that the reputation of politics as synonymous with dishonesty and corruption can be reversed through altruism and philanthropy. She leaves us with an optimistic and hopeful vision of politics, in which people can be content with their citizenship and want to help govern once more. Added-value of this summary: • Save time • Understand how altruism and citizenship can benefit politics and government • Expand your knowledge of American politics and society To learn more, read "The Samaritan's Dilemma" and discover how philanthropy and altruism may be the way forward for politics, as self-interest is left behind.

Hjelm examines the various ancient sources mentioning Samaritans, dating from the Persian period to well into the Roman period and emanating from Jewish, Christian, Hellenistic and Samaritan circles. She addresses those issues that can be related to a possible Samaritan-Judaean conflict, and special attention is given to questions about temple, high priests, Levites and prophets, as well as Shechem and Heliopolis. In this radical new investigation, Hjelm points out anachronisms in both the ancient writers and our reading of them and proposes a new understanding of the formation of both Samaritanism and Judaism.