Rabbi Brad Hirschfield is president of CLAL – the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, an interdenominational think tank and training institute in New York City. He is co-author of Embracing Life & Facing Death: A Jewish Guide to Palliative Care (CLAL, 2003) and is completing a book on the challenge of Holocaust memory in the […]

Jacob Neusner, professor of theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., co-edited Altruism in World Religions. He is the author of scores of books on Rabbinic Judaism and has encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Judaism and its texts. Neusner says altruism is best studied as a religious, not a secular, impulse. He is the editor […]

Jeffrey Schloss is professor of biology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., and evolutionary research consultant for the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He is interested in the relationship between evolutionary and theological understandings of altruism. Schloss co-edited Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy and Religion in Dialogue (Oxford University […]

Stephen Post is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Bioethics and Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University in New York. His many articles and books on altruism include, as co-editor, Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Keishin Inaba, associate professor of human sciences at Osaka University in Japan, has a website on altruism. He is author of Altruism in New Religious Movements: The Jesus Army and the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order in Britain, which examines whether Christianity and Buddhism change people’s attitudes and behavior towards altruism. He also edited The Practice of […]

Psychology professor Richard Ebstein at National University of Singapore was senior author of the altruism gene study, which showed that the dopamine gene plays a role in prosocial behavior. The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry in January 2005.

Read a seminal article by Allan Luks in the October 1988 Psychology Today that describes the “helper’s high” – a sense of calm and enhanced self-worth – observed in a study of more than 1,700 women involved regularly in helping others. Altruism functions like exercise but has some advantages over it, Luks suggests.

Read a 2003 Boston Globe article on studies linking altruism to better health and stress reduction.

Read an October 2004 Science & Theology News article on evolutionary theory and altruism.