Compassion and Time
This chapter explores how differing views of time and narrative give rise to different objects of hope and corresponding content to compassion. Reflection on the human life-course, increasingly influential in policy, practice, political thought, and ethics, provides a frame of reference for interrelating different interpretations of human life from conception to death. A faithfully secular enquiry is pursued to explore this possibility, being capacious enough to interweave various ways of conceiving the human condition. To show how compassion’s content is differentiated by varying accounts of time, the chapter examines the interrelation of tragedy, Christian theology, and compassion in conversation with Martha Nussbaum, with an excursus on Buddhism. The aim is to clarify how creation, sin, Christ’s death, and Christ’s resurrection influence the content of compassion. The account of time’s relationship to compassion which emerges—‘time suspended and reconciled’—is defined by Christ’s life-course and applied to obstetrics and palliative care.