19 numbing effect of COVID’s scale. So how does this relate to our role as Christian leaders? Well, the Forbes article confirms what servant leadership scholars have said for years: employees prosper with empathetic leaders. The article reports that “76% of people who experienced empathy from their leaders reported they were engaged compared with only 32% who experienced less empathy.”10 As Hamnet’s popularity reveals, fiction in particular may have the ability to penetrate the numbing that we may experience with a simple glance at the news on our smartphones. Scholar Martha Nussbaum notes the crucial role that literature may play in resuscitating atrophied empathy: We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined . . . Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling.11 Mary McCampbell’s 2022 article in Christianity Today similarly argues for the role of “imagination” in achieving the level of empathy demanded of us by the scriptures. Christ’s weeping was the God-man’s act of compassion and empathy, a shared mourning for the unavoidable pain of the fallen human condition. In his crucifixion, Christ’s capacity for empathy was complete. Unlike Christ, we cannot ever fully understand the mind or ex- istential experience of another, yet we are commanded to love them like we would love ourselves. This is an incredible, superhuman feat, and we need imagin- ation to help bridge the gap between ourselves and the other. As we grow our imaginations, we need stories that can convict us of our own sins of omission or commission, enabling us to see the beautiful, complex world of our neighbors as we look WHY READ FICTION AS LEADERS?
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