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Empathy and Emerging Worldviews

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Taking empathy as an aspect of social life, this inquiry examines how far empathy impacts peoples’ relationships and how far these relationships generate certain religious and nonreligious worldviews and practices.

People’s perceptions of themselves and of the worlds in which they live have been given less attention than their economic activities and political ideologies. However, this does not negate that “individual worldviews are socially embedded and controlled by large-scale social and economic forces” (Schlitz et al. 2010, 24). It is a matter of worldviews and religious orientation that give social, private, economic, and political domains themselves a subordinate position within the larger whole. The main concern here is not merely with the intellectual aspects of the worldview but also with the social, emotional, and subjective domains in which individuals understand the “other” as well as themselves in their relations to others.

Empathy is not just a part of the worldviews but...

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Correspondence to El-Sayed El-Aswad .

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El-Aswad, ES. (2017). Empathy and Emerging Worldviews. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200024-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200024-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-27771-9

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