Empathy

"Here is our first lesson in virtue from the medieval West: It was not reading novels, but reciting the Psalms, that first trained ancient and medieval Christians in the practice of imagining the world from another's perspective."
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"If, as Steven Pinker suggests, it was reading that enabled the kind of empathy that we now associate with being civilized, this was the reading practice upon which western civilization depended for over a thousand years."

~Rachel Fulton Brown