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