The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits

This was exactly the book I was looking for to answer the question I had years ago when I watched the Man Rampant interview, back when I had no idea who Joe Rigney was. It was confusing and yet intriguing to see a discussion about how something like empathy could be sinful, given how our culture treats it as the pinnacle of Christian love.

In the book, Joe breaks it down into six short chapters, starting with careful definitions. I appreciate that he takes the time to define the concept, rather than merely haranguing people about a word preference. He doesn't care if you call it sympathy, pity, love, empathy, compassion; it doesn't matter. The key is when a virtue goes wrong. He even takes the time in the appendix to answer the critics asking 'why the inflammatory rhetoric?'. I really enjoyed how he used examples from various CS Lewis books, which I expected. And while he starts with the Brene Brown video, I think the best chapter of the book is how feminism has infiltrated and eroded society and the church, using the cancellation of Calvin Robinson as a case study. The book is not long, but it packs a punch, and like the crisp Narnian air one would expect from Dr. Rigney. The last chapter, "In Praise of Compassion," was an excellent answer to the question of what to do now that we see the problem, and how to avoid the error of apathy.

One other tangential insight was his point about complementarians either being natural (patriarchal) or ideological, meaning that gender roles are arbitrary assignments from God, rather than something that cuts with the grain of our natures as male and female. The language of natural vs. ideological is much clearer than trying to use the broad/hard/thick to distinguish from narrow/soft/thin complementarians, which are really just egalitarians anyway.

Also, the cover is awesome.