There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.
What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.
Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.
This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.
From Historical Method to Empathic Participation
In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.
Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.
This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.
History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.
The Creaturely Horizon
Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.
If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.
This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.
Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.
Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.
Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control
One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.
Ecologically, this insight is crucial.
Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.
Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.
Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.
It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”
Toward an Ecological Practice of History
This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.
Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.
To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.
History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.
Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice
For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.
Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.
Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.
In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.
Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.
Conference Presentation Text
History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Creaturely Horizon of Catholic Memory
Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026
Conference Presentation Script
Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.
Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.
Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.
Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?
Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.
Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:
First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.
This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.
What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?
Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.
On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.
Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.
A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.
To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?
History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.
But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.
Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:
Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?
Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.
The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.
Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.
Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.
These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.
If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.
This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.
Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.
Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.
In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.
Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.
Let me offer one brief example.
In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.
Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.
A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.
A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?
Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.
What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?
If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.
But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.
Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.
In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.
Let me close with this thought.
Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.
If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.
The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.
Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.
And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.
Thank you.
