A prominent Catholic bishop and commentator has waded into the ongoing culture war over empathy and its role in Christianity, siding with conservative influencers who argue that practicing empathy carries great risk. Bishop Robert Barron, who heads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, and founded the popular online media organization Word on Fire, devoted a recent podcast and homily toward undercutting the role of empathy in U.S. culture.

In a YouTube video posted Sept. 6, Barron said, "If you put empathy, so defined, in the center of your preoccupation, truth, reality, justice and love are going to be threatened." 

What does it actually take to put people over politics? Republican and Democrat students discover ways to resist the pull to demean or villainize people with whom they strongly disagree.

About the Symposium
This year, our Research Symposium theme is “What is the role of empathy in democracy?”

Join thousands of like-minded individuals from around the world for a thought-provoking symposium. Purchase a ticket to experience these dynamic speakers in person—high above the city of Toronto at the beautiful Globe and Mail Centre—or join us online.

Rarely do leaders from business, politics, healthcare and public life gather to examine one question from so many perspectives.

While the word “empathy” is modern, its practice is deeply woven throughout Scripture. From God’s commands to care for the vulnerable to Jesus’ example of entering fully into human experience, the Bible offers a vision of empathy rooted in love, humility, and action.

I thought I knew what empathy meant.

I thought it meant trying to understand what another person was experiencing. Trying to, like my mom would say, put myself in another person’s shoes and imagine what they were feeling.

It seemed like a good thing. A simple virtue.

But then I began hearing empathy described as a weakness. I heard it paired with words like “dangerous,” “ruinous,” or even “sinful.” Confused, I found myself wondering how a word I’d always associated with compassion had some people warning Christians against it.

It made me curious: Is empathy biblical? What does the Bible say about empathy?

Gad Saad, evolutionary behavioral scientist and author of "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" speaks with David DesRosiers on this week's edition of "Get Real."

Saad argues that Darwinian natural and sexual selection should be applied to the human mind and behavior just as they are to physical traits. He criticizes social-science approaches that treat people as infinitely malleable blank slates, detached from biology, and describes how evolutionary theory explains the value of virtues like reciprocity, but he says empathy can become maladaptive when taken to an extreme.

This year, we awarded 101 grants to changemakers across the country.

The American Empathy Project had a simple goal: get people in a room, together, to help their neighbors.

We distributed $100,000, mobilized 1,800 volunteers, and enabled projects in 37 states (plus DC and Puerto Rico).

A single act of participation in your community sends a seismic ripple through a cynical world. Remember: The world can feel broken, but people are still good.

Learn more about the American Empathy project, and the organizations featured in this video, at AmericanHumanist.org/Impact

AI is poised to transform the very order of how our society works, how we work, connect, and collaborate, while also raising profound risks and questions about power, safety, inequality, and the kind of future we are creating. Yet so much of the conversation gets swallowed by the familiar pull of taking sides, defending positions, and trying to prove who is right.

What happens when people with very different views on AI come together, each carrying arguments they believe deeply in? The conversation may begin in the familiar territory of trying to convince, defend, or win. In this event, we will attempt to make room for real disagreement, urgency, difficult information, and high stakes, while asking whether we can stay connected enough to let those differences expand our understanding rather than turn us against one another. The hope is not to leave with one shared answer, but with a fuller picture of the whole, a deeper sense of the humanity behind each perspective, and perhaps a glimpse of what cooperation can look like when agreement is not yet possible.

Held by Yoram Mosenzon. Details, time in your own timezone, and registration: https://www.nvcrising.org/ai-meets-nvc

  

Hello Friends,

 The momentum of the Empathy Movement continues to grow, even in the face of recent books critiquing the value of empathy. I have reached out to all of these authors to invite them into a dialogue about their concerns. While they have declined to engage, this refusal only reinforces my belief that open, mutual dialogue is the ultimate test of any critique. I remain ready to dialogue g with anyone—critics included—and will continue extending the invitation. 

This season brings a wealth of opportunities to connect, learn, and practice together, including multiple international empathy conferences and summits.

Below, you will find upcoming conferences, events, trainings, interviews, and our weekly community calendar. I will be speaking at several of these global events and look forward to seeing you there.

Research originating at Georgia State University’s Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII) into empathic digital humans and human-centered artificial intelligence is continuing to evolve, with a new peer-reviewed publication, international research activity and professional recognition for Professor of Practice Jeasy Sehgal.

Sehgal’s latest paper, "Affective Scaffolding in Creative Learning: The Vivience Framework for Empathic Digital Humans as Collaborative Partners," was published Sept. 2 in the 2026 special issue of CogNexus, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal. The publication builds on the Vivience AI research trajectory, extending work that began at CMII through the development of the digital human prototypes LightArch and Annelore and the subsequent formalization of Affective-Emotive Resonance (AER).

What happens when we think of empathy not only as an individual quality, but as something we can cultivate collectively? In this conversation, we’ll explore the science of empathy with Edwin Rutsch, founder of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. 

We’ll look at what empathy is, what makes it difficult to practice, and what gets in the way of creating more empathic relationships and communities.

But this isn’t just about understanding empathy. Together, we’ll explore how we can put empathy into practice in our everyday lives, and how small, intentional actions can contribute to a more empathic culture around us.

We’ll consider questions such as:

• What does science tell us about how empathy works?

• What are some of the common challenges and misconceptions around empathy?

• What prevents us from empathising with others, especially when we disagree?

• How can we strengthen our own capacity for empathy?

• What simple practices can help us bring more empathy into our relationships, communities and everyday interactions?

• And how can individual acts of empathy contribute to a broader culture of care and understanding?

This is an invitation to move beyond empathy as an idea and explore it as a practice, one that each of us can cultivate and share with others.

Empathy allows us to connect with others and understand someone else’s experience. Empathy strengthens the social fabric that sews us all together. It encourages kindness to strangers, help to those who need it and pushes for a stronger connection amongst humanity.

Becoming educated and aware of issues around the world does not make you responsible for fixing them, but rather allows for understanding and consideration of those issues and the people affected.

By Elizabeth Bruenig

According to Gad Saad and his powerful acolytes, compassion is a recipe for “the collective suicide of the West.

A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others. This is a trend I’ve written about before, but I’ve been intrigued by the way these figures have lately been adopting the language of the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad and his influential book, Suicidal Empathy, released earlier this year. According to Saad, suicidal empathy is when otherwise positive impulses are “hijacked and used to make policy decisions that are best tackled via a sober analysis”—a phenomenon that will lead to nothing less than “the collective suicide of the West.””

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle warns that relying on AI chatbots for companionship degrades our capacity for human empathy by allowing us to bypass the emotional complexities of real relationships. Because chatbots offer frictionless interaction without the risk of judgment or the fatigue of mutual "give-and-take," users gradually lose the relational skills needed to genuinely connect with and understand others. Ultimately, this "deskilling" process makes interacting with machines feel easier than navigating human emotions, replacing authentic empathy with a manufactured, corporate-driven illusion of intimacy.

In his bookSuicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad describes a phenomenon in which empathy, normally a valuable human instinct, can become detached from considerations of reciprocity, self-preservation and long-term consequences. In his account, compassion becomes counterproductive when the desire to appear tolerant overrides a society’s willingness to defend its own institutions and values. As Saad warns: “A society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct.”

How The Empathy Gap Begins: With A Dangerous Assumption​
Social entrepreneurs frequently enter communities carrying education, professional expertise, technology, funding, institutional connections or social privilege. These resources can be enormously useful, but they can also create an illusion that because we understand a social problem intellectually, we understand the people experiencing it. We may not. Knowledge can tell us that a population faces a particular problem, and sympathy can make us care about that problem. Empathy, however, requires us to encounter the human reality underneath it. Wisdom begins when that encounter changes what we build.

Conflict is unavoidable, but a professional mediator says the way people respond to it can either widen divides or open the door to resolution.

Doug Noll, a professional mediator and distinguished fellow of the International Academy of Mediators, argues that while some people see empathy as a weakness, that view misses a key distinction. Noll says critics of empathy are “half right” because “boundaryless empathy can be exploited by manipulating people into affirming things against their better judgment.” But he says it is a mistake to dismiss empathy itself as a weak trait, calling it “a powerfully soft skill.”

Noll, who is also co-founder of Prison of Peace, an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University’s Strauss Institute for Dispute Resolution, a speaker and an author, says the answer is not to “feel less.” He warns that “hardened hearts only deepen divides.”

Latin American Conference on Empathy in Healthcare: Education, evidence and practice
Virtual event – Friday 25th September 2026, from 9am to 5pm (CST)

Keynote lectures
Professor Jeremy Howick, Director, Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare, University of Leicester, UK. With over 100 scientific publications in journals such as The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, Professor Howick is the founder of the Oxford Empathy Programme and the Global Empathy in Healthcare Network. His research demonstrates that empathetic care reduces pain, improves clinical outcomes, and protects the well-being of healthcare professionals.

Dr Mohammadreza Hojat, Research Professor & Director, Jefferson Longitudinal Study Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University, USA. Dr Hojat is the creator of the Jefferson Scale of Empathy – the most widely used instrument worldwide to measure clinical empathy in health professions students and practitioners.

Registration information
For further information and to register go to https://empatiaenlasalud.online

Disclaimer: The Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare and Global Empathy in Healthcare Network is promoting this event. We are not involved in the organisation, management, or delivery of the event and do not collect, process, or hold any attendee data. Any questions regarding registration, data protection, or privacy should be directed to the event organisers at the Center for Empathy in Healthcare in Brazil.

We tend to think of empathy and compassion as traits we either have or don't. But research tells a different story. Empathy unfolds. It deepens layer by layer as we encounter, sit with, and genuinely engage a human story. Which means that every time we interrupt, assume, or finish someone's story, we don't just miss information—we short-circuit the empathy process itself.

This session draws on original research into empathy decline in healthcare and the conditions that reverse it. Using complexity theory as a lens, participants will explore why empathy erosion is a wicked problem that resists single solutions, and why storytelling, story listening, and intentional reflection and structured debrief protocols are among the most powerful micro-interventions available. Grounded in both science and practice, the session uses story as both subject and method.

Participants will leave with:
• A new mental model: empathy as a dynamic process grounded in story
• A practical, repeatable storytelling, listening, and reflection protocol for clinical settings
• One insight they can apply in their next patient encounter

We must teach students how to protect themselves
In medical education, we lionize empathy. It is all over our mission statements, student evaluations and admissions essays. But what we do not always acknowledge is this: empathy, in its rawest form, comes at a cost. If we ask students to feel everything without teaching them how to protect themselves, we set them up for compassion fatigue and burnout.

We often teach empathy as “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” Official definitions label empathy as the act of understanding or being sensitive (even vicariously experiencing) the feelings, thoughts and experiences of others.

With AI we are entering a new era in which technology can tabulate information, recognize patterns, answer questions, and write reports at a phenomenal speed, and do tasks that would require a massive amount of human time and effort. This has huge implications for our future and what kind of skills are still important for humans to acquire. Being the smartest person in the room has little value if artificial intelligence can pull up more accurate information than the entire room has, and assess that information in moments.

Years ago, sitting across from a couple in my therapy office, I would stop them before they said a word to each other.

I'd hold my hands up, palms facing my own chest, and slowly move them outward, lifting something invisible off myself and setting it down beside me.

"Before you listen to your partner," I'd say, "take your issues, your concerns, your opinions, your judgments, lift them out of yourself, and place them over here. Not gone. Just set aside. So they don't get in the way of you actually hearing the person in front of you."