1 Picture 1000 Words: From Michael Brown's Funeral

The photo is by Richard Perry of New York Times, and shows Michael Brown's father as his son's coffin was lowered into the ground yesterday.

Novelist Sue Monk Kidd on Empathy and Seeing World from Bottom Up: Echoes of Pope Francis on Center and Peripheries

Pope Francis has stated (pdf file),

Decline in Reading Literature and Decline in Empathy Correlated: Implications of Recent Scientific Findings

At Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish site, Zoë Pollock reports  on a recent scientific study that appears to indicate empathy is on the decline among younger Americans.  Pollock links to a recent Scientific American article by Jamil Zaki analyzing this study.

Thought for the Day: Richard Rorty on Solidarity and Empathy

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognized by clearing away "prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths, but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, "They do not feel it as we would," or "There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?"

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) (p. xvi).