Tag: empathy

Empathy and Imagination as Practices of Hope

It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.

The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.

Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.

The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.

But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.

Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.

Empathy as a Way of Knowing

Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.

Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.

When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.

To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.

This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.

We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.

Imagination as the Extension of Empathy

If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.

Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.

The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.

This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.

Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.

Why These Matter in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.

Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.

Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.

Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?

Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.

Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction

The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.

Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.

Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.

When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.

This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.

And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.

A Quiet Form of Hope

Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.

Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.

None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.

Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.

In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.

And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

What is Ecology?

My PhD work at CIIS is in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (and my dissertation is on what I call the Ecology of the Cross… hence the subtitle of my site here).

Most people hear the word ecology and think of recycling bins, endangered species lists, or debates about climate policy. Ecology gets filed under “environmental issues,” which usually means something happening out there in forests, oceans, or polar ice.

But ecology did not begin as a political category, and it is not primarily about “nature” as something separate from us.

Ecology, at its root, is about home.

The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household, dwelling, or place of belonging, combined with logos, meaning study, account, or pattern of understanding. Ecology, then, is the study of the household… the attempt to understand how life lives together.

From the beginning, this includes humans. It always has.

The more scientific discipline of ecology emerged in the nineteenth century to describe relationships among organisms and their environments, but the deeper intuition is older and wider. It asks a simple but destabilizing question:

What does it mean to live within a shared world rather than on top of one?

When we reduce ecology to environmental management, we shrink this question into something technical. Forests become “resources.” Rivers become “water supply.” Soil becomes “land use.” Even conservation can slip into a language of control… how do we preserve, maintain, or optimize the system?

But ecology, in its fullest sense, is not about control. It is about relation.

An ecological perspective notices that nothing exists alone. A tree is not just a tree. It is soil, fungi, rainfall, insect traffic, bird migration, sunlight history, and deep time woven into a living form. A river is not just flowing water. It is geology, watershed, climate, agriculture, policy, memory (human and more-than-human), and story moving together across a landscape.

And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material.

Ecology, then, is not merely a branch of biology. It is a way of perceiving reality (which is why I focus so much on empathy as an ontology, or way of thinking).

It invites us to see the world not as a collection of separate objects, but as a field of entanglements. Not as a machine assembled from parts, but as a living household whose members continually shape one another.

This shift is not only scientific. It is existential.

If ecology means household, then ecological crisis is not just environmental damage. It is disordered belonging. It signals that we have forgotten how to live within the home that sustains us.

This forgetting shows up in obvious ways… collapsing biodiversity, warming climates, polluted waters. But it also shows up in quieter, more intimate forms: chronic distraction, alienation from place, the sense that life is happening somewhere else while we scroll through representations of it.

In that sense, ecology is also about attention.

To live ecologically is to learn again how to notice where we are. It is to recognize that the ground beneath our feet is not generic “environment” but a specific, storied place. The Carolina Piedmont is not interchangeable with anywhere else. The black walnut in a backyard is not just another tree. It is a living participant in a shared field of existence… shaping shade, soil, insects, birds, and even the rhythms of a person who chooses to sit beside it each morning.

Ecology begins when we allow ourselves to be addressed by the world we inhabit.

This is why ecological thinking inevitably crosses into philosophy, theology, and even spirituality. Once we recognize that existence is relational all the way down, questions arise that science alone cannot settle. What kind of beings are we within this household? What responsibilities follow from belonging? What forms of knowledge emerge not from standing apart, but from participating?

Some traditions have long held that wisdom begins with remembering that the world is not raw material but shared dwelling. Modern ecology, at its best, does not invent this insight so much as rediscover it in empirical form.

Seen this way, ecology is not just about saving the planet. The planet will persist in some form regardless of us. Ecology is about learning how to live truthfully within the web of life that makes our own existence possible.

It is about recovering the sense that we are not spectators of the world, nor its managers, but members of its household.

And that realization, once it sinks in, changes everything… from how we farm and build to how we teach, pray, design cities, raise children, and even how we sit quietly beneath a tree and listen.

Ecology, in the end, is the study of how life belongs.

And perhaps, also, the practice of remembering that we belong here too.

When Agency Becomes Ecological: AI, Labor, and the Redistribution of Attention

I read this piece in Futurism this morning, highlighting anxiety among employees at Anthropic about the very tools they are building. Agent-based AI systems designed to automate professional tasks are advancing quickly, and even insiders are expressing unease that these systems could displace forms of work that have long anchored identity and livelihood. The familiar story is one of replacement with machines and agents taking jobs, efficiency outpacing meaning, and productivity outrunning dignity.

“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”

That narrative is understandable. It is also incomplete.

It assumes agency is something discrete, something possessed. Either humans have it or ai agents do. Either labor is done by us or by them. This framing reflects a deeply modern inheritance in which action is imagined as individual, bounded, and owned. But if we step back and look phenomenologically, ecologically, even theologically, agency rarely appears that way in lived experience.

However, agency unfolds relationally. It arises through environments, histories, infrastructures, bodies, tools, and attentional fields that exceed any single actor. Whitehead described events as occasions within webs of relation rather than isolated units of causation. Merleau-Ponty reminded us that perception itself is co-constituted with the world it encounters. Edith Stein traced empathy as a participatory structure that bridges subjectivities. In each of these traditions, action is never solitary. It is ecological.

Seen from this vantage, AI agents do not simply replace agency. They redistribute it.

Workplaces become assemblages of human judgment, algorithmic suggestion, interface design, energy supply, and data pipelines. Decisions emerge from entanglement while expertise shifts from individual mastery toward collaborative navigation of hybrid systems. What unsettles people is not merely job loss, but the destabilization of familiar coordinates that once made agency legible to us.

This destabilization is not unprecedented. Guild laborers faced mechanization during the Industrial Revolution(s). Scribes faced it with the advent of the printing press. Monastics faced it when clocks began structuring devotion instead of bells and sunlight. Each moment involved a rearrangement of where attention was placed and how authority was structured. The present transition is another such rearrangement, though unfolding at computational speed.

Attention is the deeper currency here.

Agent systems promise efficiency precisely because they absorb attentional burden. They monitor, synthesize, draft, suggest, and route. But attention is not neutral bandwidth. It is a formative ecological force. Where attention flows, worlds take shape. If attentional responsibility migrates outward into technical systems, the question is not whether humans lose agency. It is what kinds of perception and responsiveness remain cultivated in us.

This is the moment where the conversation often stops short as discussions of automation typically orbit labor markets or productivity metrics or stock values. Rarely do they ask what habits of awareness diminish when engagement becomes mediated through algorithmic intermediaries. What forms of ecological attunement grow quieter when interaction shifts further toward abstraction.

And rarer still is acknowledgment of the material ecology enabling this shift.

Every AI agent relies on infrastructure that consumes electricity, water, land, and minerals. Data centers do not hover in conceptual space. They occupy watersheds. They reshape local grids. They alter thermal patterns. They compete with agricultural and municipal electrical grid and water demands. These realities are not peripheral to agency, but are conditions through which agency is enacted.

In places like here in the Carolinas, where digital infrastructure continues expanding exponentially, it seems the redistribution of agency is already tangible. Decisions about automation are inseparable from decisions about energy sourcing, zoning, and water allocation. The ecological footprint of computation folds into local landscapes long before its outputs appear in professional workflows.

Agency, again, proves ecological.

To recognize this is not to reject AI systems or retreat into Luddite nostalgia. The aim is attentiveness rather than resistance. Transitions of this magnitude call for widening perception (and resulting ethics) rather than narrowing judgment. If agency is relational, then responsibility must be relational as well. Designing, deploying, regulating, and using these tools all participate in shaping the ecologies they inhabit.

Perhaps the most generative question emerging from this moment is not whether artificial intelligence will take our agency. It is whether we can learn to inhabit redistributed agency wisely. Whether we can remain perceptive participants rather than passive recipients. Whether we can sustain forms of attention capable of noticing both digital transformation and the soils, waters, and energies through which it flows.

Late in the afternoon, sitting near the black walnut I’ve been tracking the past year, these abstractions tend to settle. Agency there is unmistakably ecological as we’d define it. Wind, insects, light, decay, growth, and memory intermingle without boundary disputes. Nothing acts alone, and nothing possesses its influence outright. The tree neither competes with nor yields to agency. It participates.

Our technologies, despite their novelty, do not remove us from that condition. They draw us deeper into it. The question is whether we will learn to notice.