235: Rick Steves: Travel as Spiritual Practice, Political Act, and Global Kinship
No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp
Seeing Global Poverty Through Travel
Rick and Lee discuss firsthand encounters with extreme poverty and how travel converts statistics into moral urgency.
When Rick Steves was 14 years old, he stood in a park behind the Royal Palace in Oslo, watching families dot the grass in joyful togetherness. That was the moment. A dawning awareness that love — deep, sacrificial, attentive love — was not unique to his own family, but radiated across the globe. “This world is filled,” he remembers realizing, “with equally lovable little kids like me. Little children of God.” It was a quiet, early epiphany — but it would shape a life.
Today, Rick Steves is a household name. But before the bestselling travel guides and beloved PBS shows, before the advocacy work and global partnerships, there was a deeply formative journey: the 1978 “Hippie Trail” from Istanbul to Kathmandu. In this conversation with Lee C. Camp, Steves opens up about the raw diary he kept on that trip — a travel journal long forgotten, then rediscovered during COVID — and how that coming-of-age adventure sparked a lifelong vocation in travel education.
But this episode is more than a story about travel. It’s a meditation on what thoughtful travel can become: a political act, a spiritual practice, a tool for personal growth, a way of learning how to love our neighbors — whether they live across the street or across the sea. Rick Steves and Lee discuss how serendipity reveals virtue, how privilege demands stewardship, and why phrases like “have a safe trip” can be far less benign than we think.
Rick Steves insists that the best kind of travel complicates our assumptions and broadens our perspective — and that we are, all of us, global citizens. This is a conversation about habit formation, global empathy, and the practices that help us live a good life.
Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript for abridged episode with Rick Steves
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No Small Endeavor: An award winning podcast exploring what it means to live a good life, with thought provoking conversations about human flourishing, theology, politics, faith, social sciences, search for meaning, meaning and purpose, practices, common good, truth beauty and goodness, productivity, habit formation, neuroscience, science and religion, social justice, the cardinal virtues, the how of happiness, theology and culture, self development, virtue theory, being human, moral philosophy, and community. Follow @nosmallendeavor
Host Lee C. Camp: Lee has worked as a professor of theology & ethics for more than 25 years, teaching and writing on topics of faith & politics, inter-religious dialog, and human flourishing at the intersection of theology, moral philosophy, and social sciences. Follow @leeccamp
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