What does it really mean to live a good life—in our politics, our faith, our work, and our relationships?
On No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, we explore the ideas, practices, and public debates that shape human flourishing today. Each week you’ll hear thought-provoking conversations with bestselling authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, theologians, artists, and political leaders—people wrestling with the biggest questions of meaning and purpose in our time.
Together we ask:
How can religion be a force for healing instead of division?
What does neuroscience reveal about happiness, habits, and productivity?
Where do politics and justice meet the pursuit of the common good?
How do truth, beauty, and goodness help us live well—personally and collectively?
If you care about faith, politics, social justice, science, or the search for meaning, you’ll find courageous, practical conversations here. Because pursuing a meaningful life is no small endeavor—and we’re with you on the road.
Learn more at nosmallendeavor.com.
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What does it really mean to live a good life—in our politics, our faith, our work, and our relationships?
On No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, we explore the ideas, practices, and public debates that shape human flourishing today. Each week you’ll hear thought-provoking conversations with bestselling authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, theologians, artists, and political leaders—people wrestling with the biggest questions of meaning and purpose in our time.
Together we ask:
How can religion be a force for healing instead of division?
What does neuroscience reveal about happiness, habits, and productivity?
Where do politics and justice meet the pursuit of the common good?
How do truth, beauty, and goodness help us live well—personally and collectively?
If you care about faith, politics, social justice, science, or the search for meaning, you’ll find courageous, practical conversations here. Because pursuing a meaningful life is no small endeavor—and we’re with you on the road.
Learn more at nosmallendeavor.com.
This is our unabridged interview with Hillary McBride.
At sixteen, Lee C. Camp drove five miles over the speed limit and was seized by terror. In his mind, if he died breaking the law, he was going to hell. That childhood fear, shaped by a theology steeped in shame and judgment, is the kind of spiritual residue clinical psychologist Hillary McBride sees in her work every day.
Clinical psychologist and researcher Hillary McBride joins Lee C. Camp to explore spiritual trauma: how religious ideas, communities, and leaders can wound our deepest sense of self — and how healing becomes possible through embodiment, grief, and honest meaning-making. Drawing from neuroscience, trauma therapy, and her book Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing, Hillary helps us name religious gaslighting, purity culture, and fear-based images of God while offering a path toward authentic human flourishing and more compassionate faith.
Key Ideas:
How Hillary defines trauma as “too much, too fast, too soon” combined with “not enough of what we needed” — and what makes spiritual trauma uniquely complex, especially in high-control religious environments that normalize harm and call it “God’s will.”
The dynamics of spiritual gaslighting: when leaders tell you your heart is deceitful, you can’t trust your own experience, and they alone can interpret God for you — often reinforced with images of hell and eternal punishment as tools of control.
How trauma fragments our sense of connection — to our bodies, to others, to the earth, and to God — and why embodiment, nervous system awareness, and somatic practices are essential for healing, not just “right beliefs” or spiritual practices that bypass our pain.
Why deep therapeutic work is not self-indulgent but a form of love: as we heal perfectionism, shame, and spiritual wounds, we become more able to live with purpose, practice courage and compassion, and participate in the healing of our communities and culture.
For more conversations like this, subscribe to No Small Endeavor.
Show Notes, Resources, and Transcript for abridged episode with Hillary McBride
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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.
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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No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp
What does it really mean to live a good life—in our politics, our faith, our work, and our relationships?
On No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp, we explore the ideas, practices, and public debates that shape human flourishing today. Each week you’ll hear thought-provoking conversations with bestselling authors, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, theologians, artists, and political leaders—people wrestling with the biggest questions of meaning and purpose in our time.
Together we ask:
How can religion be a force for healing instead of division?
What does neuroscience reveal about happiness, habits, and productivity?
Where do politics and justice meet the pursuit of the common good?
How do truth, beauty, and goodness help us live well—personally and collectively?
If you care about faith, politics, social justice, science, or the search for meaning, you’ll find courageous, practical conversations here. Because pursuing a meaningful life is no small endeavor—and we’re with you on the road.
Learn more at nosmallendeavor.com.
