Category: The Dish

Empathy Within Reason

Stephen Sparks talks to Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, about the connection between shame and empathy:

SS: Do you think that your sensitivity to shame can lead one to be more empathetic? To take an example from the book, I think of “Devil’s Bait,” on Morgellons disease. Many of the people with Morgellons suffer from a double burden of shame: the physical toll of the disease (apparent on their skin) and the fact that it’s not officially recognized, that it’s written off as psychological—it’s real, but not quite. In reflecting on their suffering, you also reflect on your response to that suffering, which moves you into a consideration of the role that reason plays in empathizing. This is another big question: where does reason stand in relation to shame? To empathy? I want to say that thinking through another’s suffering will move one closer toward an understanding of it, but there’s a nagging part of me that’s skeptical. …

LJ: I think you’re so right about the double shame of Morgellons, and it’s fascinating to parse it that way because the two shames are both simultaneous and oppositional—physical damage promises the possibility of proof that suffering is “real” but also compounds and deepens the isolating effects of that suffering. Which gets back to the question of reason—whether it always deepens empathy or whether it sometimes gets in the way.

I felt how strange it was to look at scarred skin and feel several reactions at once—the brute, gut feeling of sadness; the scars proof that suffering had happened, no matter why or how—but also the curiosity of those scars, how they had gotten there, to what extent we might call them self-inflicted. And in those moments, the reasoning mind did feel like radio static interrupting the reception of pain with its nagging questions. This was a nice word of yours: nagging. So often good ethical impulses start as nagging—like a little kid tugging on a shirt or a finger, until we stop and pay attention.

Have you read Paul Bloom’s piece in The New Yorker, “The Baby in the Well: A Case Against Empathy”? He posits a very different kind of relationship between reason and empathy. Basically, he argues that empathy can get in the way of sound moral reasoning, and we ought to supplant it—or at least leaven it—with reasoning. Often the situations that call forth our instinctive sympathies aren’t really the ones we should be acting towards: a little girl caught in a well arouses more collective sympathy than the anonymous millions starving in Africa—but we owe so much to the suffering that hasn’t been or can’t be compressed neatly into narratives that tug our heartstrings.

Previous Dish on Jamison and The Empathy Exams here and here.

Quote For The Day

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” – C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Saint Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

Complicated Beyond Belief

Rafaella Marcus began to have doubts about her Catholicism when she was thirteen years old. She shares her experience of losing religion, yet maintaining a different kind of faith:

I grow older still and I realise that though I myself do not believe in the mass, that I utter the creed and the Our Father as a formality only, that formality is important to people around me. I wonder how my mother faith’s makes way for her ready acceptance of my cousin’s coming out, her openly pro-choice stance, her frank (too frank) discussions with me about contraception. When my eighty year old Italian Catholic Nana attends the civil partnership ceremony between my cousin and her wife, loves their children (her great-grandchildren!) with the same unreserved love as she has for any of the others, I can only come to the conclusion that belief is complicated beyond … well, beyond belief. I see now that rules bend for love and that, perhaps, is the grace I was looking for at the age of thirteen on that Saturday evening, in that church.

And I realise, along the way, that it is not God I have outgrown at all, but only the religion I grew up in. Now that I am at least a little grown up, I no longer go to church except at Christmas and Easter, and the transition has been soft and simple and has hurt no-one. … I no longer define my faith – neither an atheist, nor an agnostic, nor a lapsed Catholic – for why would I need to? It ebbs and absorbs the tragedy, it grows as I grow. There is so much more to living well, I find, than simply being good.

Face Of The Day

Screen shot 2014-04-04 at 11.53.02 AM

Photographer Emma Kisiel focuses on roadkill:

Emma Kisiel’s “At Rest” is a photographic series depicting roadkill on American highways and addressing our human fear of confronting death and viewing the dead. Both morbid and beautiful at once, Emma builds and photographs these roadkill memorials at the location at which their life was taken. Speaking about the project she says, “My images draw attention to the fact that, while man has a vast impact on animal and natural life, dominant American religions insist that animals do not have a place in Heaven and are, therefore, of little value in our society.”

See more of Kisiel’s work here. Her blog is here.

Serving The Word

As a young man, Nick Ripatrazone considered becoming a Roman Catholic priest, but after meeting his wife in college, he realized his calling was to be a husband and father – and writer. He now sees that writing and faith share more than he once thought:

I want to bear witness to a sacramental vision. I want to admit my life as a sinner. Rather than judge others, I want to use empathy to sketch their imperfect lives on the page, and find the God that I know resides within them. Similar to the life of a priest, there is a space for silence in my writing life, but also a time of engagement with both reader and place.

I write from a Catholic worldview, but don’t often write about clergy or Catholic schools. Father Joe taught me that lesson, and thankfully, I listened. For me, writing is a form of prayer. I recognize that time spent at my desk can devolve into hours of selfishness, so I need to earn those words. Good fiction can be a form of good works. As a Catholic, I recognize that life is a story of continuous revision, of failure and unexpected grace, and of dogged hope. I am comfortable with the white space of ambiguity and mystery. I have faith, not certainty. To approach God in any other manner deflates the divine. I write and I believe in order to better see the world. Now, more than a decade after I left that rectory convinced I was meant to become a father and not a Father, a writer and not a pastor, I finally realize that I have not traded one vocation for another. I have discovered their common source.

The Little Boy Who Cried Heaven

Heaven is for Real, which opened last weekend, is the story of Colin Burpo, the four year-old son of a small town pastor who supposedly glimpsed heaven during an emergency appendectomy. The film is based on a book of the same title. When Jeb Lund compared the book and the movie, he found much more doubt and uncertainty in the big screen adaptation:

The film version of Heaven Is for Real seems to have been written in anticipation of the audience’s doubt. Screenwriter and director Randall Wallace—the guy behind Braveheart and the bridge-less Battle of Stirling Bridge—makes up a lot of dissonantly secular elements that don’t appear in the book and that spoil the tone of the movie.

A fictional church elder played by the reliably excellent Margo Martindale dislikes Colton’s story because she has seen pastors manipulate people with stories of heaven and threats of hell. The only reason for her character to exist is to inform the audience, “See? This story isn’t being manipulative.” Then, when Todd becomes too fixated on Colton’s story despite mounting medical bills and no income, his wife (played with a kind of impishly spirited good humor by Kelly Reilly) throws dishes in the sink and castigates him for thinking so much about the next life instead of this one. In addition to never appearing in the book, this scene thuds in the middle of the movie. This is Wallace screaming, “I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING, GODLESS AMERICAN MOVIEGOER.”

On the other hand, Kenneth Morefield argues that the presence of doubt in the film, including that of Colton’s father, Todd Burpo, actually makes it a better movie:

By distributing skepticism evenly across all the characters, even the Christians, Heaven is For Real avoids much of the smugness that marred God’s Not Dead. Like that film, Heaven is For Real has a token atheist/skeptic who is actually angry at God rather than dubious of his existence.

But unlike that film, Heaven is For Real doesn’t force a conversion on the skeptic as a means of declaring its own intellectual victory. This film looks inward, using Colton’s story to ask Christians to think through what they really believe, rather than focusing all their energy on how to get non-Christians to believe it too. Its dramatic highlight is a graveside conversation between Todd and Nancy (the always reliable Margo Martindale) that at least attempts to wrestle with the “why” questions. Why Colton? Why do so many prayers go unanswered? Why, if heaven is real, does death still sting so much, even for Christians?

Drew Dyck points out the gap between Colton’s vision of heaven and what we find in the Bible:

Some may be surprised that the Bible contains not one story of a person going to heaven and coming back. In fact Jesus’ own words seem to preclude the possibility: “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven – the Son of Man” (John 3:13).

Scripture does contain several visions of heaven or encounters with celestial beings, but they’re a far cry from the feel-good fare of the to-heaven-and-back genre.

In Scripture, when mortals catch a premature glimpse of God’s glory, they react in remarkably similar ways. They tremble. They cower. They go mute. The ones who can manage speech express despair (or “woe” to use the King James English) and become convinced they are about to die. Fainters abound.

But, in another review of the film, Kyle Rohane reminds us that “ecstatic experiences are valuable, not because of the precise, objective details they reveal, but because they are subjective and personal”:

In 1224, Francis of Assisi witnessed a figure descending from heaven. This figure appeared to be a man but also a six-winged Seraph. He was affixed to a cross with two wings extended over his head, two covering his body, and two stretched out in flight. As Francis observed the figure’s radiant face, the figure smiled down at the monk. Francis was both overjoyed by the figure’s beauty and grieved by his suffering on the cross.

Do you think Francis pondered over the type of wood the cross was made of? Do you think he analyzed the ethnicity of the glorious figure? No, Francis understood his ecstatic experience to mean he would be made like the crucified Christ in mind and heart. The vision left him with a renewed commitment to and love of Christ.

Book Club: Can Christianity Survive Modernity? Ctd

All of these readers seem to answer “yes” to the above question:

I was raised a Christian in a tiny, Midwestern town where everyone went to either the Catholic church or the Protestant church. I was surrounded by unquestioning believers until I left for college. I had lost how-jesus-became-godmy faith in my early teens and it stayed lost for the next 40 years or so. But I now consider myself a Christian, with all the attendant doubts and questions. I credit books like Ehrman’s and groups like the Jesus Seminar for my change of heart.

Why? Because their research and scholarship affirmed the actual existence of Jesus and his horrific death. Up until then, Jesus was just a mythical being, like Zeus or Thor. I felt I finally had something solid to stand on, and so I started my faith journey.

I didn’t mind the messiness and contradictions in the gospel accounts at all. It makes it feel more authentic and vivid to me, like I was witnessing all those men and women trying to make sense of something new and strange. I would have been extremely skeptical if the New Testament had been a smooth and seamless account, because I can’t imagine actual humans responding to such wild events in a smooth and seamless way. I mean, it must have been so weird, y’know?

Another is on the same wavelength:

The problem comes when a screwdriver is used to drive a nail into the wall. Logic as we know it is not at the core of religion. This is not a diss; religion is akin to non-Euclidean geometry, or to quantum physics. It goes by a different creed, ethos, set of “rules” – whatever.

bookclub-beagle-trEhrman’s textual analysis is great, and I’ve loved his books. To see his scholarship as weakening Christianity, however, is to sell religion short. The story of Christ is a portal, a doorway to enter religious life. Its literal truth or untruth is of little to no interest. People who insist on the inerrant truth of this or that need to watch Rashomon a few times, take mushrooms, and chill out. The Gospels are full of Jesus telling parables; get the hint?

Another:

I am a practicing Catholic who attends Mass almost every Sunday, prays every day and even prays the Liturgy of the Hours as often as my hectic schedule allows. I love the Catholic Church despite having some great misgivings about some of its priorities and teachings, especially in the areas of sexuality. I concluded long ago from reading Ehrman, Geza Vermes and others, that the New Testament is almost an historical novel, with many (but by no means all) of the words of Christ having been made up by the authors of the Gospels. Since I believe that the fall of man in Genesis cannot be true, I cannot believe that Christ died and was resurrected as a sacrifice to expiate original sin.

So why am I a Catholic?

You wrote: “But since the scholarship is pretty much indisputable, it seems to me that it is not Christianity that should be abandoned in the wake of these historical revelations, but a false understanding of what the Gospels and Letters actually are.” This sums up why I still consider myself a Catholic. As Ehrman lays out in his book, the beliefs of the early Church evolved as the theologians and philosophers tried to figure out who and what Jesus was. They couldn’t know, because even people who knew, loved and followed Christ apparently didn’t fully understand him. All the Church fathers had were the writings of others and oral traditions. What they achieved was a tour de force of logic and intellect as they refined their understanding of Christ.

Is this refined understanding accurate? Of course not, and neither is Ehrman’s, but it is the best we can do as mere humans. A Church that at least proclaims the hope and love exemplified by Jesus is my home.

Interestingly, Ehrman has written elsewhere that he is agnostic not because of where his scholarship has led him, but because of the issue of theodicy.

In Ehrman’s words:

About nine or ten years ago I came to realize that I simply no longer believed the Christian message. A ehrman_bart_12_020large part of my movement away from the faith was driven by my concern for suffering. … We live in a world in which a child dies every five seconds of starvation. Every five seconds. Every minute there are twenty-five people who die because they do not have clean water to drink. Every hour 700 people die of malaria. Where is God in all this? We live in a world in which earthquakes in the Himalayas kill 50,000 people and leave 3 million without shelter in the face of oncoming winter. We live in a world where a hurricane destroys New Orleans. Where a tsunami kills 300,000 people in one fell swoop. Where millions of children are born with horrible birth defects. And where is God? To say that he eventually will make right all that is wrong seems to me, now, to be pure wishful thinking.

Another reader:

“Does this book effectively debunk Christianity’s core claims in modernity … or does it point to a new way of understanding and believing them?” I have wrestled with this same question after reading Reza Aslan’s book, Zealot. What his book and Ehrman’s book point towards is that Christianity as we know is a Romanized version that is far removed from the actual lives and times of Jesus of Nazareth. But for me, both books gave me a stronger faith in Jesus. This may be because I have always been quite liberal in my interpretation of Christianity. For me, follow the Golden Rule, help the least fortunate amongst us, and trust in the teaching of Jesus have always been the central tenants of my faith.

I am often told that to be Christian you have to believe in the Resurrection. You have to believe that Jesus died on the Cross for our sins and was resurrected to sit by God. Both of these books ultimately arrive at this point as well. Is one a Christian if they do not believe in the Resurrection? If there is no Resurrection, is there Christianity?

This is a question I have grappled with and continue to grapple with at this time. However, I think the answer to both questions is that the Resurrection does not have to be literal, as is true of other parts of the Bible. Why would it diminish the faith if Christianity/the Resurrection were interpreted to be that Jesus taught us how to live a better life, temper our sins, have a relationship with God, and died for these teachings and went to Heaven as the Son of God, as all of us will as the son and daughters of God? This would only diminish the faith in so far as it would not appeal to 3rd and 4th century Roman authorities and fulfill a literal interpretation of the Messiah prophecies.

I don’t know about you, but the former provides me a stronger faith for living in the 21st century and is more accurately backed up by historical research. This is why I say both of these books should give us comfort as Christians living in the 21st century, as we can embrace a historical Jesus that is divorced from the politics of the creation of the religion that is named after him. As Aslan writes, this is a Jesus worth believing in and following towards a relationship with God.

Another:

Let me start by saying that I am at least a non-theist and very probably what almost anyone would describe as an atheist.  I also have a Jewish background and very strongly identify with the Jewish community.

So does Ehrman “debunk Christianity’s core claims…”?  Absolutely not.  What he does do is make it clear that these Gospels were written by human beings who had very human motivations, and not all of those motivations were directly related to pure belief in Jesus.  They had political motivations, personal feelings, and all the limitations of humans – not to mention very little or no understanding of the physical world that our science has begun to give us in the past 300 or so years.

It is of course possible that the core claims of Christianity are not true, but just because the gospels were written by flawed human beings doesn’t make them so.  It is certainly possible that the understanding of Jesus evolved along exactly the lines that Ehrman describes and slowly and gradually approached the current “truth” – or maybe even that the understanding of that truth can evolve further.  It is possible that the followers of Jesus simply did not or could not grasp the full truth immediately and that it took them centuries to get there.

On the other hand, it is very difficult to distinguish this process from another process – the development of a false religion over hundreds of years as its doctrine grew.  How can we tell the difference between a true religion in which theology developed and a false religion that added layer after layer of false theology?  I don’t think we can from examining the historical record of how the theology grew.

So Ehrman neither debunks nor proves Christianity, but I think he does make believers face the fact that the Gospels were written by humans (with all that implies) and theology is rarely completely static and fixed.  There I think he does a great service to Christians, if they will allow it.

Another atheist reader:

Your question of whether Christianity can survive modernism grabbed me.  It is a serious question whether any Church can survive, without another schism, the conflict between fundamentalists and “modernists” we see being played out in the world.  Pope Francis may have found the answer – de-emphasize the doctrinal elements of the faith and emphasize the compassion in the rituals and good works inspired by the faith.  A wonderful balancing act, in which I wish him all the best.

(Please email any responses to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com rather than the main account. Read the whole Book Club thread on How Jesus Became God here.)

Humanists In The Foxhole

Adelle M. Banks reports that the military will now allow serving members to identify as humanists:

More than two years after first making his request, Army Maj. Ray Bradley can now be known as exactly what he is: a humanist in the U.S. military.

“I’m able to self-identity the belief system that governs my life, and I’ve never been able to do that before,” said Bradley, who is stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and works on supporting readiness of the Army Reserve’s medical staff. Lt. Col. Sunset R. Belinsky, an Army spokeswoman, said Tuesday (April 22) that the “preference code for humanist” became effective April 12 for all members of the Army. …

The change comes against a backdrop of persistent claims from atheists and other nonbelievers that the military is dominated by a Christian culture that is often hostile to unbelief. In recent years, activists from the broad spectrum of freethinking organizations have demanded equal treatment as the tradition-bound military grapples with the growth of the spiritual-but-not-religious population.

Jason Torpy explains the importance of the decision:

For many atheists in the military, identifying as a humanist is a positive expression of their values. The unintended consequence of religion vs. non-religion debate results in only two options: belief in a god (usually the Christian one) or belief in nothing. Humanists believe in many things—reason, compassion, empathy, and service for others, as exemplified by Humanist Society Celebrants or charitable organizations like Foundation Beyond Belief.

In addition, recognizing “Humanist” as an answer to the religious preference question is a step toward recognizing humanist chaplains in the military. Religious service members have long enjoyed the benefit of talking privately with a chaplain, and humanists should be afforded the same access to a leader who is training in counseling and understanding of humanist and non-religious viewpoints. Many major religious and non-religious leaders are in full support of a humanist chaplain in the military, even when the House of Representatives rejected the idea.

Our previous coverage of humanist chaplains is here and here.