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Good Morning Empathy – or the lack of it – is much in the news - to feel for others often being cited as a basic human and essential humanitarian trait. Yet empathy has its limits - as pointed out by American psychologist Paul Bloom in a recent book called ‘Against Empathy: the case for rational compassion’. On the one hand, he argues, we can be moved by the plight of a particular person but forget the big picture; on the other we can be emotionally engaged but still fail really to help - for an approach that will genuinely make a difference requires not only fellow-feeling but rational thought and strategic intervention – or perhaps no intervention at all. For Christians and Jews the first commandment is to love God with all the heart, body, mind and strength. For Jesus, such love of God was revealed in loving neighbour – a love that includes empathy, but does not stop there. The good Samaritan, for example, coming across a beaten up Jewish man didn’t just feel for him. He had to think about what to do; he had to risk assess the situation; he had bodily to heave the man onto his donkey; and if his intervention was going to be effective he had to use his economic strength to secure the man a period of recovery. Empathy alone may be of limited use, but there’s another problem with holding up empathy as a criterion of our humanity: its most likely to be limited to people like us rather than being extended across social boundaries; so research into 2000 Twitter users by Demos published earlier this month suggests that social media, which theoretically can link us with people across the globe, in fact only act as echo chambers, amplifying our own sense of the most important problems in life and how to tackle them. So Jesus made a hated Samaritan the hero of his story, thus pointing the lawyer he was addressing to think across social boundaries. In 1786, John Wesley made a similar point, saying: ‘one great reason why the rich, in general, have so little sympathy for the poor, is, because they so seldom visit them.’ By contrast, this week, The Poverty Truth Commission began a new venture in West Cheshire, deliberately bringing together equal numbers of people who live in poverty with the key decision-makers whose interventions affect their lives – lawyers amongst them. The experience of such face to face meetings across Scotland and now springing up in England as well is not only that through personal encounter the empathy of policy-makers gets engaged, but that new thinking becomes possible as attention focuses on solving the actual problems experienced by those on the ground. The motto of the movement originates from apartheid South Africa: ‘Nothing about us, without us, is for us’. Empathy as a criterion of our humanity is perhaps overrated. Perhaps we also need to consider the ways in which our own actions – and the policies we support – actually address the real needs of those we are seeking to help.