In our unending culture wars, the rampaging armies of the "left" and the "right" make a regular practice of tearing down the valued treasures of the other side and burning them publicly. One of the recent treasures that has been set on fire is Empathy. We can see this in the cottage industry of anti-Empathy books such as: Gad Saad’s "Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind" (2026), Allie Beth Stuckey's "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion for Political Gain" (2024), Joe Rigney's "Sin of Empathy" (2019) and "The Sin of Empathy" (2024), and Paul Bloom's "Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion" (2016).
This week, Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron added his gasoline to the fire in this sermon on Empathy, Aquinas, and Love. Bishop Barron has been someone I deeply respected in the past, and I own several of his books, and have used his videos in several classes. However, I find fatal flaws in the argument and rhetoric of Barron here, and fear he has been co-opted by reactionary elements of the right.
In the video, Barron engages with Aquinas' definition of Love (to will the good of the other) which he is spot on about. However, he also fabricates his own strawman caricature of "empathy™", which has very little to do with actual Empathy as advocated by professionals such as pastors, psychologists, and social theorists. Perhaps Barron has received his definition of empathy™ from the reactionary authors he lists who made it up to advance their politics, or perhaps he got it from the worst of Tik Tok and "therapy influencers". Either way he should know better, and deal with the strongest version of a concept, not strawman the weakest version.
