Mary McCampbell, author of Imagining Our Neighbours as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy, discusses the place of imagination in shaping our attitudes and actions to those around us. How does empathy echo the incarnation? Is there a ‘sin of empathy’ where we take compassion too far so that other people’s agendas control us? How we can empathise while disagreeing well with or challenging other people? Dr. Mary McCampbell is an associate professor of humanities at Lee University where she regularly teaches courses on contemporary fiction, film, popular culture, and modernism. Find out more about Mary at her website marywmccampbell.com, and sign up for her Substack, The Empathetic Imagination. Timings 00:00 Intro 00:32 Welcome 00:55 Introducing Mary and her book 04:35 Why is empathy important to discipleship? 10:00 How do you define 'empathy'? 12:24 Imagination and the imago dei 16:55 How can we choose stories to engage with that most cultive empathy? 22:10 Why have some Christians get talked about the 'sin of empathy'? 30:27 How do you have empathy for someone who shows no empathy? 34:07 L'Abri, community and empathy 38:41 Further recommendations Links * Get Mary’s book Imagining Our Neighbours as Ourselves - Fortress Press, Amazon.co.uk, Scribd * Watch Imagining Our Neighbours As Ourselves Fieldmoot Keynote Lecture, by Mary McCampbell * Choose Your Own Enchantment - How should Christians decide what media to consume? by Caleb Woodbridge, Equip.org including listening to our neighbour’s stories as a way of loving them * An example of the evangelical suspicion of empathy that we critiqued in the podcast: The Enticing Sin of Empathy - Joe Rigney, Desiring God Transcript This is an auto-generated transcript that has been lightly corrected and edited. Please excuse any remaining errors and infelicities! Caleb Woodbridge: Welcome to Imaginative Discipleship. I'm Caleb Woodbridge, and I'm really pleased to have with me this week Mary McCampbell. Welcome Mary! Mary McCampbell: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you very much. Introducing Mary and her book Caleb: The topic we've got is one that you've written on. We're going to be exploring the connection between imagination and empathy and the Christian life. What's your background? How did you come to write about this? Mary: Just to say a little bit about me, I'm a professor at Lee University in Tennessee, and my area is literature, particularly contemporary literature and popular culture and how that relates with theology. I [00:01:00] think what really led me to writing about this book is basically my teaching and seeing what happens in the classroom. I think I've long been aware of how reading and watching movies and listening to music and looking at visual art helped me to see from somebody else's perspective, but the significance of it didn't really register on a deeper level until I saw what was happening with my students. And how you could, I could see transformations happening. And in particular, I have an article I wrote not too long ago, in particular about teaching Othello, Shakespeare's Othello, in a regular class I teach every year. Also teaching the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. And I teach in the deep south United States and certainly there's still so much racial tension, and there will also be students, [00:02:00] white students that might have come from communities where they really didn't interact with people of color very much. So reading both of those books, because Othello deals so much with racial profiling, and then also reading of course Douglas's Narrative. I've had so many students that really had never thought, in particular white students, who had never thought about the experience of a person with darker skin being judged and having these kind of microaggressions leveled at you and overt aggressions, in the case of both of those books. They just had never thought about it and it really struck something in them. And it also, of course, with these cases I would see with black students, it was empowering for them to be able to speak openly about these things if they wanted, you know, so anyway, I see it with all kinds of works of literature and film, but those two really stand [00:03:00] out to me. So, and I thought this is, this is about a kind of spiritual formation. I mean, every semester that I start with my general education classes, I talked for years, I've done this, I talk about the importance of empathy, and I give examples of how you must use your imagination in order to put yourself in the life experience, shoes of another, in order to love them more deeply. So [chuckles] that's just a little intro! Caleb: Yeah. Great. And your book is "Imagining Our Neighbors As Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy." So that's very much the overall theme and thesis of it. I think that's really interesting and vital. I wrote an article about how Christians should think about what they watch and engage with. And often, that question's approached from the question of, "Is it suitable? Is the content suitable?" Mary: Yeah. Caleb: And I was saying, well, actually, I [00:04:00] think there's an important sense in which it's a form of listening attentively to our neighbors. And yes, it's really helpful to have that perspective. On this podcast, I'm keen to be exploring that intersection of imagination and spiritual formation, the role it plays in our discipleship. Why is empathy important to discipleship? Caleb: So, why is cultivating empathy an important part of Christian discipleship? How does it fit within that frame and picture? Mary: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go to maybe the most extreme example, I mean, since I've been really reading and thinking a lot more about this, I've realized how much the idea of loving enemies is really at the heart of the gospel. Caleb: Mm-hmm. Mary: And it really is what sets Christianity apart. I mean, of course, there are many things that set Christianity apart, but even those who would say they're open-minded and liberal in their understanding of love one [00:05:00] another, there still tends to be a kind of tribalism. Caleb: Mm-hmm, yeah. Mary: Whereas Christianity is, we, in our rebellion, had made ourselves enemies to God, and the idea that Christ is the most... You can't get any deeper empathy than the incarnation, you know, and it's not possible for us to, of course, do what Christ did and really understand what it was like to live like us. But our imagination, in order to try to get over that hurdle and our natural inclination, which is to label others, dismiss others, gravitate towards people that we're initially comfortable with. But, it really does take intentional work of cultivating the imagination. And you use the word attentiveness. Attentiveness is really just to kind of [00:06:00] linger. I mean, that's an act of love to linger on someone's story, to spend more time, to slow down. Caleb: Mm-hmm. Mary: And I think that allows us to expand the imagination, to think how they are, what life is like for them. And I talk a lot about the Good Samaritan story, and there's a great MLK quote where he talks about the priest and Levite who didn't go over and help the man who had been beaten up. And he said that in their minds, it was, "What's gonna happen to me if I go over?" It's a fear-based, "What's gonna happen to me?" Whereas the Samaritan did what we should all be doing, "What's going to happen to him if I don't?" And so there's a sense of humility, but I think maybe we think less of ourselves if we allow space to hear the other story and then imagine life [00:07:00] that they're experiencing. Caleb: Yeah. I'm reminded of the line in the film Lady Bird where you have the exchange someone says to her, "Oh, you really seem to love the community she's in," and she says something like, "Oh, no, I just pay attention." And the person replies to her, "Don't you think attention and love are the same thing?" And I think that's a really interesting thing we. Would you go so far to say that in the act of imaginatively putting ourselves in other people's shoes, there is in that some kind of echo of the incarnation, how Christ as God became a human became one of us to sort of bridge that gap between us? Mary: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it echoes Christ's most perfect and complete act of empathy. When we create, we're echoing the most perfect and whole act of creation. You know, when God began, started the world and created the world. I feel like we're called to love our enemies, and the only way we can really do that is through imagining what it's like to be them, rather than objectifying them. So, yes, that is echoing Christ. I mean, I'm just thinking about Christ on the cross when he says, "They know not what they do," and it's like he knows the whole story. He knows why they're doing this. He knows. There's a sense that he is... Yeah, I'm thinking about Christ with the woman at the well. He knows her story, and rather than dismissing her, banishing her, he loves her. How do you define ‘empathy’? Caleb: Just on that in terms of defining terms a bit. How would you define empathy then? What's the relationship between love and empathy, just to distinguish those? Mary: I think empathy, well, sympathy. Sympathy, and these terms have flipped in their meaning over the years. So it's interesting. But the way we think of it now generally is that sympathy is when you feel sad for someone, and it seems to still keep a power differential. Caleb: Mm-hmm. Mary: There could be a kind of condescension there, whereas empathy is allowing yourself to feel as the other person feels. So you're on the same plane? Caleb: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mary: So, I'm thinking about an example. In the... I don't know if you've watched The Chosen? Caleb: No, I've been hearing good things about it. I've actually just downloaded the app onto my Apple TV so I can watch it on my TV at some point. But yeah, do you recommend
