Stanford University’s Jane Shaw is a kind of empathy activist.
“How do you make the leap,” she said a few days ago, “to understand the experience of another person is really what empathy’s about.
Shaw, Stanford’s Dean for Religious Life, was showing me around a small-but-choice exhibit called Empathy, at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center.
The show is a companion piece to a class on empathy Shaw is teaching this fall, and a way for any museum goer to engage with a hot topic these days for religious scholars, neuroscientists, artists and politicians
Everyone from President Barack Obama to social psychologists are reporting a deficit in empathy and or a lack of compassion among college students, and a corresponding rise in narcissism.
.By Cy Musiker
