Often when we seek to understand the past, we look for a standard of judgment, and we often turn to our own contemporary standard. And we assume that past historical actors should be operating under the same assumptions we hold today. We call that presentism when we show up to look at someone who lived 500 years ago and we say, “Well, that man had a child, so he must think about fatherhood the exact same way I think about fatherhood.” That is a terrible error to make that assumption

because so many things are different. Just as we have empathy for ourselves, understanding our motivations and our reasons for doing things or saying things, we need to extend that same empathy to others. When I've come across situations that are troubling to me,

I've always had to put situations into categories. Do we really have the full story? Do I really understand the full story? Am I able to capture and know perfectly all the other contributing factors to a situation that aren't in the item that I’m reading or the news story that I’m seeing? We talk a lot about science and scientific experiments, and people have a sense that you do an experiment and then you share your results and someone goes and repeats the experiment to verify it. Well, history doesn’t work that way because all the people are dead. And the past is gone, and all we have are pieces that are left over. So we have somebody's journal. We maybe have a photograph with no labels, so we don’t know who’s in the photograph. And we have a letter. Historians have to put all those pieces together and think about them and try to understand them. And so it’s not really a place for hypotheses or the kind of data replication that we do in other fields. And I think especially when we find ourselves confused or frustrated with figures in Church history, practicing empathy for them because as children of God, we all deserve that.