Truth. Sacrifice. Radical Conviction.

Interfaith Dialogue

St. Edith Stein

The Stranger and the Self

There is a moment in every genuine encounter with another person – another culture, another faith, another way of understanding the world – when the encounter ceases to be comfortable and becomes, instead, productive. This is the moment when the other stops being a curiosity to be examined from a safe distance and becomes, instead, a challenge to the categories I have been using to organize my own experience.

I call this the moment of unsettlement. And I believe it is the most important moment in any interaction across difference, because it is the moment when understanding – genuine understanding, not the polite recognition of difference that passes for understanding in most multicultural discourse – becomes possible.

Interfaith Dialogue
St. Edith Stein

On Holding Multiple Identities

I have lived, across the course of a single life, inside more identities than most institutions are comfortable acknowledging in a single person.

I was born Jewish, into a family that observed the traditions with a seriousness that shaped everything I would later become. I became, through philosophical inquiry, an atheist – not casually, but rigorously, as a consequence of the questions I was asking and the answers I was finding. I became, through a process I can describe but not fully explain, a Catholic, and eventually a Carmelite nun. I was, throughout all of this, a philosopher – a student of Husserl, a scholar of phenomenology, a thinker who could not stop thinking even when thinking led to places that were inconvenient for the identities I inhabited.

Interfaith Dialogue
St. Edith Stein

Empathy Is Not a Feeling

The word “empathy” has been so thoroughly degraded by popular usage that I must begin by reclaiming it from the territory of sentiment and returning it to the territory of philosophy, where it originated and where it does its most important work.

Empathy, in common usage, means “feeling what another person feels.” This definition is not merely imprecise. It is wrong in a way that obscures the most valuable thing about empathy and replaces it with something that is, at best, sympathetic projection and, at worst, a form of emotional colonialism in which I replace your experience with my imagined version of it and call the result “understanding.”

Interfaith Dialogue