Christian Charity vs. “Suicidal Empathy”

Friends, in the latest episode of the Word on Fire Show, I sat down with Matthew Petrusek to discuss Gad Saad’s provocative and timely new book: Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind. We explore how a distorted form of empathy is undermining Western civilization, how it fundamentally differs from authentic Christian charity, and what we should do to constructively respond. 00:00 | Introduction 01:40 | Bishop Barron interviews JD Vance 02:45 | How Saad defines “empathy” 04:45 | Saad’s argument on the exaggeration of empathy 06:31 | Exploring the concept of “forbidden knowledge” 09:30 | “It will destroy the West”? 11:05 | Connecting wokeism and self-destructive empathy 12:33 | Can we square wokeism’s moralizing mandates with its amoral claims? 13:40 | Tracing the movement’s origins 16:27 | Mistaking empathy for love 22:01 | Recognizing the fallenness of our emotional lives 27:39 | Does love equate to niceness and kindness? 28:50 | What about “love thy neighbor”? 30:42 | Distinguishing a proper preference for the poor from its unhealthy overemphasis 32:46 | Addressing the Christian impulse beneath the wokeist trappings 34:42 | Listener question: Where was God before time? 36:33 | Join the Word on Fire Institute