What Makes a Powerful Story

This is our unabridged interview with Malcolm Gladwell.

What causes suffering in our society? Intentional evil? Or something less apparent and possibly more unsettling—indifference?

In this conversation, master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell and host Lee C. Camp explore the moral power of storytelling in light of Gladwell’s latest Revisionist History series, ⁠⁠The Alabama Murders⁠⁠. What begins as a devastating true crime account of a 1988 murder in northwestern Alabama unfolds into something far more unsettling: a decades-long moral failure cascade marked not by villainy alone, but by indifference. 

Malcolm corresponded and interviewed Lee for the series to understand the religious and cultural context of the narrative. Together, they examine how stories can awaken our capacity to see, care, and imagine a different world.

Key Ideas:

• How Story Can Awaken Moral Vision Stories do moral work by helping us see what we have learned to accept as normal—and revealing it instead as a distortion.

• Good Stories Betray Expectations Well Powerful stories disrupt our predictions about the world, forcing us to imagine alternative possibilities for justice and goodness.

• Take Indifference Seriously Drawing on the insight that “sin is often a failure to bother to care”, Gladwell argues that indifference may be the defining moral danger of modern life.

• Honor Beauty Without Blindness Truthful storytelling can hold together love for communities and traditions while honestly naming the harm they sometimes produce.

• Forgiveness Should Have an Action Is forgiveness without action actually forgiveness?

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources and Transcript⁠⁠ for abridged episode with Malcolm Gladwell⁠⁠

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No Small Endeavor: An award-winning podcast that asks what it means to live a good life. Through conversations with leading thinkers across theology, philosophy, psychology, politics, and the social sciences, we explore human flourishing, meaning and purpose, faith and culture, science and religion, virtue and character, community, and the practices that help shape a good life grounded in truth, beauty, and goodness.

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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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