I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.

Sometimes I do feel exposed. I have this kind of theory about different channels or levels of relaying experience - when I tell someone, one on one, in a personal context, about something that's happened to me - that has a very different valence, a different charge, than when/if I've said it in a public forum.

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.

I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.

Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.