Empathy is not just some vague urging to be kind. Empathy is a precondition for certain knowledge of the world. The isolated individual, trying to contemplate the world alone, has no chance of understanding it.
“Theological formation is the gradual and painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
"The love of God is not a thing one comprehends
but that by which — and only by which — one is comprehended."
"Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge."
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."