In Walden Thoreau shows the importance of reading the classics to building a better society.
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Tag Archives: empathy
The Right’s Attacks on Empathy
Rightwing groups have started attacking empathy itself, which literature fosters. Ayn Rand would approve but not Shakespeare.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Ayn Rand, Fountainhead, King Lear, William Shakespeare Leave a comment
“Clarissa” Taught the Age Empathy
A new book argues that epistolary novels, especially “Clarissa,” taught the 18th century empathy.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Clarissa, Daniel Defoe, Denise Diderot, Enlightenment, Humphrey Clinker, Moll Flanders, Roxana, Samuel Richardson Comments closed
To Teach Empathy, Turn to Lit
Literature is a powerful way to teach empathy–but do so, literature must be taught in different ways than many teachers do.
Eyes Welded Shut by Mortal Pain
Spiritual Sunday Today’s Old Testament lesson, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, is catnip to hellfire and brimstone preachers, who use it as a parable for what they regard at the modern world’s sinful ways. I find deeply problematic, however, the idea that a city is so unredeemable that every man, woman and child must […]
A Tolstoy Fable about Radical Empathy
Tolstoy’s story “Esarhaddon” captures a common wish fulfillment of the powerless–that the oppressor see the world through the eyes of the oppressed.
Can Lit Make the Rich More Empathetic?
With growing income disparity comes a decline in empathy. Literature can help rebuild our compassion.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Clansmen, Honoré de Balzac, Income inequality, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Dixon, Thomas Pinker, violence Comments closed