"Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy" with Dr. Mary McCampbell

Theology on Tap Chattanooga

Anyone reading comments in online spaces is frequently confronted with a collective cultural loss of empathy. This profound deficit is directly related to the inability to imagine the life and circumstances of the other. Our malnourished capacity for empathy is connected to an equally malnourished imagination. In order to truly love and welcome others, we need to exercise our imaginations, to see our neighbors more as God sees them than as confined by our own inadequate and ungracious labels. We need stories that can convict us about our own sins of omission or commission, enabling us to see the beautiful, complex world of our neighbors as we look beyond ourselves.

In this lecture, Dr. Mary McCampbell will look at how narrative art–whether literature, film, television, or popular music–expands our imaginations and, in so doing, emboldens our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves.

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Dr. Mary McCampbell is an associate professor of humanities at Lee University where she regularly teaches courses on modern and contemporary fiction, film, and popular culture. A native Tennessean, she completed her doctorate at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK); her research focused on the relationship between contemporary fiction, late capitalist culture, and the religious impulse. Her academic and public-facing publications span the worlds of literature, film, and popular music, and this interdisciplinary focus is also present in her new book, Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy (Fortress Press: April 5, 2022). You can find her writing in various faith and culture publications such as Image Journal, The Other Journal, Relevant Magazine, Christianity Today, Christ and Pop Culture, and The Curator. She has been one of the organizers of Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music since 2009, and she frequently speaks and teaches on the theological significance of popular music, film, and fiction. Mary was the Summer 2014 Writer-in-Residence at L’Abri Fellowship in Greatham, England and periodically lectures at English L’Abri. She was a Scholar-in-Residence at Regent Theological College, Vancouver, for the 2018 winter term.
You can read Mary’s writing and find out about her new book at marywmccampbell.com.