A couple of years ago, a meme started to float around in what I think of as my Internet circles that wasn’t so much a joke as it was an expression of despair. It was simply a block of text – I think it was originally lifted from a headline – that read, “I don’t know how to tell you that you are supposed to care about other people.”

My response fell somewhere between a laugh and a pang because the macro in question was being spread in areas that, in many cases, were supposed to be explicitly Christian spaces. A lot of people seemed to think that a lot of others needed reminding that love of neighbor is the command second only to love of God, according to Christ.

I don’t feel like I need to belabor the point that a lot of Christian discourse about our duty to neighbor has fallen well beyond the wayside, landing in a kind of rhetorical puddle that allows the idea to mutate until the Good Samaritan finds the man beset upon by thieves and offers minimal, virtue signaling help before asking, “But what did he do to get there? What was he wearing when the thieves attacked him? Was taking this road asking to get robbed?”

I’ve seen this attitude a lot, not only among friends and acquaintances but also among those who work with the poor or disadvantaged. Compassion fatigue often pushes good-hearted people into performing the mental calculus of determining who are the truly deserving poor.

Then, of course, there are those who have nothing to offer the poor but wine mixed with gall, who think being poor or even disabled is a moral failing that should be viewed with quibbling compassion – and they should be grateful for what they get! – or outright contempt....