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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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 ›
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The beginning of my empathy lessons
My empathy lessons started when I was about four years old. My Mom would tell me bedtime stories. Right before bed, she would weave a narrative out of the significant events of a day in the life of an “on the go,” four-year-old boy.
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Summer Reading: The Song of Our Scars by Haider Warraich
To course-correct our approach to pain, we need to change the story of chronic pain – pushing back on the voices attempting to convince us all pain is catastrophic and life threatening and needs immediate attention over everything else right now – but yet – pain is world consuming
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Beloved on Juneteenth in the context of empathy
Forced to make a decision that no one should have to make; that no one can (really) make; and yet that she did make. This survivor is also a now a perpetrator. Moral trauma.
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Summer Reading: Wonder Confronts Certainty: by Gary Saul Morson (Reviewed)
Novelistic truth teaches the reader to give up absolute truth—certainty—and learn to dance in the dynamics of life’s sometimes chaotic but committed conversations in which dogmatic agreement yields to the give and take of empathic relatedness.
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Rhetorical Empathy – a primer
At first, empathy and rhetoric seem to be at cross purposes – yet the speaker without empathy is not likely to be effective or persuasive, no matter how much we may disagree
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Historical empathy, strict construction of the US Constitution – and guns
Whatever the Founding Fathers intended with the Second Amendment, they did NOT intend: Sandy Hook. They did not intend Nashville, Covenant School. They did not intend Uvalde, Parkland, Columbine, Buffalo, NY, Tops Friendly. They did not intend some 119 school shootings and counting since 2018.
Empathy Lessons 