Traditions of Compassion: From Religious Duty to Social Activism [Hardcover]

Throughout history, compassion has stood at the base of the radical cry to change the world order and remedy injustices. It has also been a political tool for society's power-wielders, who have exploited the sense of calling compassion arouses to hide the repressive, belligerent, and manipulative nature of society's power structure. This book analyzes four models of compassion, each representing manifestations of compassion in different cultures and eras: Judeo-Christianity, Buddhism, Modernism, and the author's alternative, a response to neocapitalist postmodernism-radical compassion and its imperative to take action.Introduction PART I: DIVINE COMPASSION The Compassionate God Human Divinity Seeds of Anti-Compassion PART II: UNIVERSAL COMPASSION Indiscriminate Compassion The Buddhist Ideal Compassion without Teeth PART III: HUMAN COMPASSION The Fragmentation of Compassion Compassion Revisited Conclusion Endnotes BibliographyKHEN LAMPERT is Lecturer at the Tel-Aviv University Department of East-Asian Studies, Tel-Aviv University, Israel. His areas of expertise are philosophy; critical theory; East-Asian cultures; and history of ideas. For over twenty years, concurrent with his academic activities, he has worked with children in underprivileged neighbourhoods in Israel (both Jewish and Arabs), in a wide range of capacities (counsellor, co-ordinator, instructor, director). He is the author of Compassionate Education: Prolegomena for Radical Schooling (2003) and the co-author of A Voice Unheard: Insight to Children's Distress (2005) (Hebrew).