Robert Wuthnow, author of the book Acts of Compassion, asks, “Have we come to the point where, ironically enough, our charity has become a selfish act?” The results of my study appear to support Wuthnow’s premise on the rise of vocabularies of fulfillment. Respondents who suggested sacrificial motives were only those who received a survey that was intentionally altered to reflect only vocabularies of sacrifice. The majority of respondents, therefore, used vocabularies of fulfillment and had utilitarian motives, with only a few supplementing their responses with sacrificial motives. Open-ended interviews which did not place a creative limitation as the close-ended questionnaires did, only had vocabularies of fulfillment present. The status
