One of the most dispiriting aspects of our current political life is the profound lack of empathy for the way others experience the world. The purpose of human life in the new reign Jesus signals entails a commitment to recognizing the relationship between a system that produces basic inequality as a matter of design—and not as a matter of coincidence. But such a recognition requires a properly formed moral imagination, one capable of imagining what the disadvantaged might feel like to be victims of a system perpetually stacked against them. In other words, empathy—the ability to see and feel the world as another does—is necessary in the pursuit of faithfulness.

But empathy alone isn’t enough either; it must prompt us to act. This workshop investigates the way that followers of Jesus can cultivate empathy, and then how to put that empathy to work.