Download or read book The Politics of Compassion written by Michael Ure and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical overview of the role of the emotions in politics. Compassion is a politically charged virtue, and yet we know surprisingly little about the uses (and abuses) of compassion in political environments. Covering sociology, political theory and psychology, and with contributions from Martha Nussbaum and Andrew Linklater amongst others, the book gives a succinct overview of the main theories of political compassion and the emotions in politics. It covers key concepts such as humanitarianism, political emotion and agency in relation to compassion as a political virtue. The Politics of Compassion is a fascinating resource for students and scholars of political theory, international relations, political sociology and psychology.
Download or read book The Politics of Compassion written by Bin Xu and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 87,000 people and left 5 million homeless. In response to the devastation, an unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations streamed into Sichuan to offer help. The Politics of Compassion examines how civically engaged citizens acted on the ground, how they understood the meaning of their actions, and how the political climate shaped their actions and understandings. Using extensive data from interviews, observations, and textual materials, Bin Xu shows that the large-scale civic engagement was not just a natural outpouring of compassion, but also a complex social process, both enabled and constrained by the authoritarian political context. While volunteers expressed their sympathy toward the affected people's suffering, many avoided explicitly talking about the causes of the suffering—particularly in the case of the collapse of thousands of schools. Xu shows that this silence and apathy is explained by a general inability to discuss politically sensitive issues while living in a repressive state. This book is a powerful account of how the widespread death and suffering caused by the earthquake illuminates the moral-political dilemma faced by Chinese citizens and provides a window into the world of civic engagement in contemporary China.
Download or read book The Politics of Compassion written by Edward U. Murphy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Compassion explores the manifold obstacles that hinder our individual and collective capacity to care for the vulnerable, offering insights from history, religion, ethics, cognitive and social sciences, international relations, public policy, and contemporary politics. It examines both how far we’ve come in addressing poverty and social injustice and how far we still have to go. It concludes by discussing strategies to help us achieve a more consistent practice of compassion in public life.
Download or read book How Compassion can Transform our Politics Economy and Society written by Matt Hawkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Compassion can Transform our Politics, Economy, and Society draws together experts across disciplines – ranging from psychology to climate science, philosophy to economics, history to business – to explore the power of compassion to transform politics, our society, and our economy. The book shows that compassion can be used as the basis of a new political, economic, and social philosophy as well as a practical tool to address climate breakdown, inequality, homelessness, and more. Crucially, it also provides a detailed plan for its execution. It marks the first time that the study of compassion has been applied across multiple disciplines. The book provides a template for the study of compassion on an interdisciplinary basis and will appeal to academics, professionals, and the general reader searching for a fresh and inspiring approach to the seemingly intractable problems facing the world.
Download or read book The Politics of Compassion written by Sirriyeh, Ala and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2018-06-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether addressing questions of loss, (be)longing, fears of an immigration ‘invasion’ or perceived injustices in immigration policies, immigration debates are infused with strong emotions. Emotion is often presented as a factor that complicates and hinders rational discussion. This book explores how emotion is, in fact, central to understanding how and why we have the immigration policies we do, and what kinds of policies may be beneficial for various groups of people in society. The author looks beyond the ‘negative’ emotions of fear and hostility to examine on the politics of compassion and empathy. Using case studies from Australia, Europe and the US, the book offers a new and original analysis of immigration policy and immigration debates.
Download or read book Compassion Conviction written by Justin Giboney and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Book Award® program Outreach Resource of the Year Have you ever felt too progressive for conservatives, but too conservative for progressives? Too often, political questions are framed in impossible ways for the faithful Christian: we're forced to choose between social justice and biblical values, between supporting women and opposing abortion. As a result, it's easy for Christians to grow disillusioned with civic engagement or fall back into tribal extremes. This state of affairs has damaged Christian public witness and divided the church. The authors of this book represent the AND Campaign, which exists to educate and organize Christians for faithful civic and cultural engagement. They insist that not only are we called to love our neighbors through the political process but also that doing so requires us to transcend the binary way the debates are usually framed. In simple, understandable language, they lay out the biblical case for political engagement and help Christians navigate the complex world of politics with integrity, from political messaging and the politics of race to protests, advocacy, and more. The book includes a study guide for classroom use and group discussion. When we understand our civic engagement as a way to obey Christ's call to love our neighbor, we see that it is possible to engage the political process with both love and truth—compassion and conviction.
Download or read book Compassion written by Lauren Berlant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Compassion, ten scholars draw on literature, psychoanalysis, and social history to provide an archive of cases and genealogies of compassion. Together these essays demonstrate how "being compassionate" is shaped by historical specificity and social training, and how the idea of compassion takes place in scenes that are anxious, volatile, surprising, and even contradictory.
Download or read book Politics of Empathy written by Anthony M. Clohesy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Empathy argues that empathy is a necessary condition for ethical subjectivity and the emergence of a more compassionate world. One of the reasons empathy is important is because it gives us a sense of what it is like to be someone else. However, to understand its ethical significance we need to look elsewhere. This book claims that empathy is ethically significant because, uniquely, it allows us to reflect critically on the nature of our own lives and sense of identity. More specifically, it allows us to reflect critically on the contingency, finitude and violence that define existence. It is argued that, without this critical reflection, a more ethical and democratic world cannot come into being. Our challenge today therefore is to establish the social and political conditions in which empathy can flourish. This will be a difficult task because powerful political and cultural forces are reinforcing the divisions between us rather than encouraging us to come together in a cosmopolitan community of mutual recognition and solidarity. However, despite these limits, there is hope for a brighter future. The book argues that this can only come about if the Left accepts its responsibility to articulate the contours of a new politics of internationalism and establish the foundations of a sustainable ethical community in which strangers will be accepted unconditionally. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, multiculturalism and international relations.
Download or read book Against Empathy written by Paul Bloom and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Post Best Book of 2016 We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it. Nothing could be farther from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion. Basing his argument on groundbreaking scientific findings, Bloom makes the case that some of the worst decisions made by individuals and nations—who to give money to, when to go to war, how to respond to climate change, and who to imprison—are too often motivated by honest, yet misplaced, emotions. With precision and wit, he demonstrates how empathy distorts our judgment in every aspect of our lives, from philanthropy and charity to the justice system; from medical care and education to parenting and marriage. Without empathy, Bloom insists, our decisions would be clearer, fairer, and—yes—ultimately more moral. Brilliantly argued, urgent and humane, AGAINST EMPATHY shows us that, when it comes to both major policy decisions and the choices we make in our everyday lives, limiting our impulse toward empathy is often the most compassionate choice we can make.
Download or read book Education Asylum and the Non Citizen Child written by H. Pinson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded 2nd Prize, Best Book award, the Society for Education Studies, 2011 Refugees are physically and symbolically 'out of place' - their presence forces governments to address issues of rights and moral obligations. This book contrasts the hostility of immigration policy to 'non-citizen'' children with teachers' exceptional compassion and 'citizen students' ambivalence in defining who can belong.
Download or read book Forces of Compassion written by Erica Bornstein and published by School for Advanced Research on the. This book was released on 2011 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surrealism of imagining contemporary humanitarian techniques applied to historical events indicates more than dramatic technological transformation; it also suggests limits to contemporary assumptions about common human feeling and associated action.
Download or read book The End of Compassion written by Alejandro Portes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-18 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together the most recent and the most comprehensive collection of articles on a population at risk: the children of immigrants in the United States, especially those children whose parents came to the country without legal authorization. The end of compassion and the shift to temporary migration to source the labour needs of the American economy have brought in their wake a series of consequences, some of which were predictable and others unexpected. The chapters fully document the nature and implications of the enforcement initiatives implemented by the American government in recent years and their interaction with state policies and local contexts of reception. This collection provides an exhaustive testimony of the severe conditions faced by unauthorized migrant families and their children today and their repercussions in both countries of origin and those where they currently live. The End of Compassion will be of interest to researchers and academics studying migration in the United States and ethnic and racial studies, and to advanced students of sociology, public policy, law and political science. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Download or read book The Pity Party written by William Voegeli and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When liberals don't have reason, authority, or the American people on their side, they turn to the one thing they never run out of: Pity. For decades, conservatives have chafed at being called "heartless" and "uncaring" by liberals who maintain that our essential choice as a nation is between the politics of kindness and the politics of cruelty. In The Pity Party, political scientist William Voegeli turns the tables on this argument, making the case that "compassion" is neither the essence of personal virtue nor the ultimate purpose of government. Over the years, liberals have built a remarkable edifice of government programs that are justified by appeals to compassion: Head Start, immigration reform, gun control, affirmative action, and entitlements, to name only some. As Voegeli amply demonstrates, the liberals who promote these massive programs are weirdly indifferent as to whether they succeed. Instead, when the problems they are intended to solve fail to disappear, liberals double down, calling for yet more programs and ever greater expenditures in the name of "compassion." Meanwhile, conservatives who challenge the effectiveness of these programs are slandered as "heartless right-wingers." Yet rather than challenge this tendentious liberal argument, the many conservatives it intimidates feel it necessary to insist that they really do "care." However, liberal compassion's good intentions consistently fail to translate into good results. Voegeli walks the reader through a plethora of programs that have become battlefields between conservatives fighting for more efficiency and liberals fighting for more budget-busting federal programs to address an ever-expanding catalog of social ills. Along the way, he explains the underpinnings of the liberal philosophy that reinforce this misapplied ideal and shows why today's self-described compassionate liberals are ultimately unfit to govern.
Download or read book Compassion written by Henri J. M. Nouwen and published by Image. This book was released on 2006-01-17 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative essay on that least understood virtue, compassion, the authors challenge themselves and us with these questions: Where do we place compassion in our lives? Is it enough to live a life in which we hurt one another as little as possible? Is our guiding ideal a life of maximum pleasure and minimum pain? Compassion answers no. After years of study and discussion among themselves, with other religious, and with men and women at the very center of national politics, the authors look at compassion with a vigorous new perspective. They place compassion at the heart of a Christian life in a world governed far too long by principles of power and destructive control. Compassion, no longer merely an eraser of human mistakes, is a force of prayer and action -- the expression of God's love for us and our love for God and one another. Compassion is a book that says no to a compassion of guilt and failure and yes to a compassionate love that pervades our spirit and moves us to action. Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison have written a moving document on what it means to be a Christian in a difficult time.
Download or read book The Hand of Compassion written by Kristen Renwick Monroe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-23 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through moving interviews with five ordinary people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, Kristen Monroe casts new light on a question at the heart of ethics: Why do people risk their lives for strangers and what drives such moral choice? Monroe's analysis points not to traditional explanations--such as religion or reason--but to identity. The rescuers' perceptions of themselves in relation to others made their extraordinary acts spontaneous and left the rescuers no choice but to act. To turn away Jews was, for them, literally unimaginable. In the words of one German Czech rescuer, "The hand of compassion was faster than the calculus of reason." At the heart of this unusual book are interviews with the rescuers, complex human beings from all parts of the Third Reich and all walks of life: Margot, a wealthy German who saved Jews while in exile in Holland; Otto, a German living in Prague who saved more than 100 Jews and provides surprising information about the plot to kill Hitler; John, a Dutchman on the Gestapo's "Most Wanted List"; Irene, a Polish student who hid eighteen Jews in the home of the German major for whom she was keeping house; and Knud, a Danish wartime policeman who took part in the extraordinary rescue of 85 percent of his country's Jews. We listen as the rescuers themselves tell the stories of their lives and their efforts to save Jews. Monroe's analysis of these stories draws on philosophy, ethics, and political psychology to suggest why and how identity constrains our choices, both cognitively and ethically. Her work offers a powerful counterpoint to conventional arguments about rational choice and a valuable addition to the literature on ethics and moral psychology. It is a dramatic illumination of the power of identity to shape our most basic political acts, including our treatment of others. But always Monroe returns us to the rescuers, to their strong voices, reminding us that the Holocaust need not have happened and revealing the minds of the ethically exemplary as they negotiated the moral quicksand that was the Holocaust.
Download or read book Habits of Compassion written by Maureen Fitzgerald and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-12-11 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Irish-Catholic Sisters accomplished tremendously successful work in founding charitable organizations in New York City from the Irish famine through the early twentieth century. Maureen Fitzgerald argues that their championing of the rights of the poor—especially poor women—resulted in an explosion of state-supported services and programs. Parting from Protestant belief in meager and means-tested aid, Irish Catholic nuns argued for an approach based on compassion for the poor. Fitzgerald positions the nuns' activism as resistance to Protestantism's cultural hegemony. As she shows, Roman Catholic nuns offered strong and unequivocal moral leadership in condemning those who punished the poor for their poverty and unmarried women for sexual transgression. Fitzgerald also delves into the nuns' own communities, from the class-based hierarchies within the convents to the political power they wielded within the city. That power, amplified by an alliance with the local Irish Catholic political machine, allowed the women to expand public charities in the city on an unprecedented scale.
Download or read book Tough Love written by Cynthia Burack and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A staple of the culture wars, the struggle between Christian conservatives and progressives over sexuality and reproductive rights continues. Focusing on ex-gay ministries geared to helping same-sex attracted people resist their sexuality and postabortion ministries dedicated to leading women who have had an abortion to repent that decision, Cynthia Burack argues that both are motivated and characterized by a strain of compassion that is particular to Christian conservatism rather than a bias and hatred toward sexual minorities and sexually active women. This compassion reproduces the sexual ideology of the Christian right and absolves Christian conservatives from responsibility for stigma and other forms of harm to postabortive and same-sex attracted people. Using the democratic theory of Hannah Arendt, the popular fiction of Ayn Rand, and the psychoanalytic thought of Melanie Klein, Burack studies the social and political effects of Christian conservative compassion.
