Life & Faith

Tim Costello brings a lifetime of experience to bear on the question: why is compassion so complicated? “You won’t find anyone who actually says humans shouldn’t be compassionate. It then gets messy because we soon discover that we have different objects of compassion, priorities for compassion. It’s fascinating to me that, whether you’re on the right or left or in between, you will validate your political stand by appealing to compassion. So it is the universal benchmark - and yet, we still divide. And often divide quite bitterly.” Tim Costello has spent decades trying to understand compassion - what it is, how it works - and also trying to live it out. His new book in CPX’s Re:CONSIDERING series is called The Cost of Compassion, and it sums up the lessons of a lifetime working with and for the vulnerable. In this conversation, Tim tackles a few of the big questions: why is compassion so complicated? In an age of news overload, what do we do about compassion fatigue? And who is compassion for - who benefits