Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another,” or as it is often said, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. From an article on the Masters of Communcation web site: In simple terms, empathy is the ability to understand things from another person's…
Exposing yourself to new ideas is critical, and if you only read one article this month, I highly recommend this, powerful, important piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times Magazine. This long article is a short way to learn about the injustices Black people have faced in the…
Early last summer, I read Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. It’s an amazing book I highly recommend, and I recommended it in my most recent post, Be an Antiracist. It was in that book that I first heard…
On August 19, 2015, I published a post about #BlackLivesMatter. In that post, I wrote about the movie Fruitvale Station, the true story about the tragic killing of Oscar Grant, which I had seen in 2013, coincidentally, around the same time I had read the extremely important, highly acclaimed book The…
All the talk about essential workers, and the realization that so many of the heroes of this pandemic have been people whose contributions to society were previously taken for granted, reminded me of something my wife told me. Last year she attended a seminar and the presenter held up a…
In this horribly sad time of COVID, with so many families experiencing illness and the death of loved ones, by complete coincidence I just finished reading a book about death and dying. Many years ago, I read Complications by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon and his writing about his…
We can detest someone's actions without detesting the person. We can hate the sin without hating the sinner. When I think of these words, it reminds me of what Arthur Brooks said about loving your enemies in his book and when I heard him speak, which I wrote about here.…
Pride Month has just come to an end, and I was thinking about the way LGBTQ issues have been in the news in a big way over the last few years. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 for equal rights for those in same-sex marriages. The fight for transgender…
Empathy is an important skill for all of us. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes helps you to understand their situation. And if you understand, you will be able to treat them with compassion. I recently heard an example of someone putting himself in the shoes of…
Many people dismayed by Hillary Clinton's loss are looking for any positive takeaway from her run. They point to her winning the popular vote by almost three million votes as evidence we will have our first female president sooner than later. Having a female at the top of a major…
I recently watched All the Way, an HBO movie about the story of Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If you have access to HBO, you should be able to watch it on demand. In addition to learning about the history and events surrounding that critical legislation (which…
The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe rarely generates the level of empathy it would have if it was closer to home. This American Life, the wonderful radio show / podcast, recently sent staffers to Greece to learn the stories of refugees. The stories were then shared over the course of…