At its best, empathy makes us grasp that another person – every other person indeed – is not an object on a landscape but a real subject, a subject of beauty and of infinite value, regardless of who or what he or she may be.
It is empathy that refuses to allow us to distinguish and, in the worst sense, discriminate between those who are like us and those who are not. The Christian perspective will link all of this instinctively with the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, but it does, of course, have a wider dimension for all of humanity, including those who do not profess religious faith.
Archbishop Richard Clarke
