Author Archives
Dedicated and committed that empathy becomes less of a rumor and more of an expanded reality in the community...
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Empathy Lessons, 2nd Edition, is now an ebook – and LIVE!
Empathy is oxygen for the soul (see Chapter 6: Evidence-based empathy training). So, if you are short of breath due to life stress, get the expanded empathy delivered in this book. Just as the body needs oxygen to live physically, the soul needs empathy to live emotionally.
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Empathy: A Lazy Person’s Guide is now an ebook and live!
Empathy training is all about practicing balance: You have to strive in a process of trial and error and try again to find the right balance. So “lazy person’s guide” is really trying to say “laid back person’s guide.” The “laziness” is not lack of energy, but well-regulated, focused energy, applied in balanced doses. The risk is that some people – and you know who you are – will actually get stressed out trying to be lazy. Cut that out! Just let it be! Drive out hostility and aggression, and empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth!
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Alternative facts, harmful half-truths, damn lies, and total nonsense – about empathy
Empathy works. Empathy makes a profound and lasting difference. But in the age of TikTok does it work fast enough? Empathy and its many successes are themselves the occasions for the skepticism, resistance, and seeming embrace of the obstacles to empathy. A rigorous and critical empathy can be hard work; better to take the easy way out. The reader may say, I want instant empathy, like instant coffee, just add hot water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice?
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Review: Empathy and Desire in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction by Thomas Horan
Invoking desire is like throwing a libido bomb – the result is going to be an explosion of emotional anarchy. No one escapes the chaos. In so far as one has to tear down the old temple (or government) before raising up the new one, desire will do the job nicely. Totalitarian rule is the systematic canceling and nullification of empathy, indeed of the possibility of empathy.
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Paul Ricoeur, Philosopher of Empathy
This article on Paul Ricoeur, empathy, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in literature will be engaging to students of Ricoeur and empathy alike. One can download the PDF : http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/ricoeur/article/view/628
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Top Ten Empathy Trends for 2024
The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy.
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The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s Native Son
Until Bigger Thomas (BT) committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:
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Fake Empathy in Black for a Day by Alisha Gaines (Review)
If one starts with pretending to be who one is not, then one does not end up with authentic empathic relatedness. Fake empathy in; fake empathy out.
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Mutilated Empathy in Migrant Aesthetics by Glenda Carpio (Review)
Review: Mutilated empathy in spite of itself in Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023, 285pp.) [This review updated to correct typos and grammatical infelicities on Dec 10, 2023.]… Read More ›
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Empathy is hard in the patriarchy
So far, the two-ton elephant in the room is “Maybe men and women really do have different brains – or a combination of brains and early experiences that produce different results from the same input.” Note this applies either in… Read More ›
Empathy Lessons 