Trials of empathy
Late yesterday, in a packed Paine Hall, Rowan Williams, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, gave the first of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values — part of a traditional series delivered at nine or more universities across the world since 1979. With a complex critique of empathy, he quickly got into the spirit of what philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner intended for the series he founded: “a search,” Harvard President Drew Faust reminded the audience, “for a better understanding of human behavior and human values.” And who better to investigate the meaning of empathy, said Homi K. Bhabha in his introduction, than Williams, a theologian, philosopher of language, poet, and translator? (Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, is director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, which hosts Harvard’s Tanner Lectures. The series continues at 4 p.m. today and Thursday.) Books by Williams — who is now master of Magdalene College, Cambridge —...