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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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 ›
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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.
Empathy Lessons 