Tag: chaplaincy

As a Lay Chaplain, with empathy having opened the door and now standing or seated beside the bed of someone less a stranger, I continue to listen with deep attentiveness.

I ask myself, was I able to effectively engage this diversity, to the extent I did, because I had empathy – somehow already endowed with it? Or did my empathy grow as I continued to engage diversity, in high school, college and professionally – is empathy somehow learned?

If it were to have some success in sticking, integrative learning should involve focused, deliberate and purposeful learning activities, a pedagogy that spins, separates, reconstitutes, and reconnects the spokes and hub in a single experiential event.

The stories of the intersection of diversity and commonality, of empathy and intentional engagement traveled with me into the academy as an ethnographer.