An unlikely pair of writers put courage in the foreground of their thinking about how to live a virtuous life.
Maya Angelou memorably said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
C.S. Lewis made a related point in The Screwtape Letters, a satirical novel in which a senior devil writes letters to an apprentice on how to corrupt human beings. “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality,” the senior devil explains. “A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
These days, we expect courage to turn us in the direction of being bold, of taking risks. But we do not expect courage to turn us in the direction of mercy or empathy for others.
Empathy is the practiced ability to connect emotionally with the experience of another person, to imagine your way into what they feel and see and what they are carrying. It is not agreement. It is not pity, which looks down from a safe distance. And it is not simply a mood that you have or don’t have. It is a human capacity, cultivated over time by paying attention to the reality of other people and seeking to understand what they feel and see. (Interestingly, researchers have found that reading fiction increases empathy—but only if readers become emotionally engaged with the characters.)
That’s where courage comes in. For us to see anyone clearly, we have to put down the category we had ready for them. Categories are safe. They tell you what to think before you look. Empathy costs us that safety and requires us to look and to feel.
Of course, because it is 2026, nothing in our culture escapes contention – not even empathy.
An academic critique of empathy came first, evaluating empathy as unreliable. In Against Empathy (2016), Paul Bloom argued that empathy works like a spotlight: bright, narrow, and aimed by bias. It makes us care intensely about the one child in the well and not at all about the statistical thousands. Bloom argued for “rational compassion” instead. Bloom is not a culture warrior, but his book now gets borrowed by people who are.
Political scientists have also used data to uncover an uncomfortable insight about empathy. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review found that people high in empathic concern are more polarized, because they empathize hard with their own side and feel hostility toward whoever threatens it. However, a separate study on empathy out of Stanford revealed that empathy is a choice and a practice, not a fixed trait. This study found that just believing the other side is willing to empathize makes people more willing to do it themselves. (An interesting AI detour: a 2023 study found that evaluators rated ChatGPT’s answers to patient questions as more empathetic than physicians’ answers. But further inquiry found that AI studies measured agreeableness, not care. The chatbot validates, but real care sometimes has to disagree.)
And that lands us on Elon Musk’s conversation with Joe Rogan in early 2025, in which Musk said, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” This started what rapidly became known, in media circles, as the “war on empathy.”
No wonder empathy takes courage.
In Luke’s gospel (7:36-50), a respectable man named Simon hosts a dinner party, only to have a woman with a reputation slip in and pour out her love at Jesus’ feet: tears, kisses, costly perfume. Simon has watched her this whole time and concluded that he knows exactly what sort of woman she is. Jesus turns toward the woman and then asks his host a question: “Do you see this woman?” It’s notable that Jesus engages Simon not with a rebuke but with a question – a question about truly seeing another human being.
The courage that empathy asks of us is often just that: turning and looking up from the file we are keeping on other people. Looking beyond the category we have for them. Putting ourselves at risk by refusing to participate in conventional wisdom or shared righteous indignation, for the goal of building up a wise, gentle, and diverse community, growing – together – into the image of God and likeness of Christ.
Toni Morrison once wrote:
No seeing, no bonding,
no bonding, no mercy,
no mercy, no responsibility.
Each point in Morrison’s statement requires a courage our culture desperately needs right now. And congregations are one of the very best places to practice it .
When you think of someone being courageous, what images immediately come to mind?
Why is courage the most important virtue, according to Angelou and Lewis?
For you, what is the most complicated thing about empathy?
Where do you see empathy exercised in your congregation? Where do you see it withheld?
How does Morrison take us from “seeing” to “responsibility”? Where along that path do you think your church board needs to focus its own work?
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