This episode starts simple: books we love, and why they move people.

Debra shares how she wasn’t allowed to read The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings growing up, and how reading Tolkien later changed her — not just as a reader, but spiritually. We talk about “lenses”: how fear, maturity, suffering, hope, and experience change what you notice when you return to the same story.

From there, the conversation widens into bigger ground: how stories reveal what authors (and cultures) value, why modern storytelling often feels “gray for the sake of gray,” and why moral clarity matters — especially when we’re forming kids. We also wrestle with name-calling and dehumanizing, corporate worship as formation, communion as communal grace, and why fairy tales used to function as warnings before we sanitized them. 

Debra Peck is an author and speaker whose work focuses on religious scrupulosity OCD and spiritual formation. She is the author of The Hijacked Conscience and has spent years helping individuals, families, pastors, and counselors understand what happens when faith becomes fused with fear — and how people can recover without losing their faith.

In this conversation, Debra brings that same depth into a different topic: why stories shape people, how worship forms us, and why community is not optional if faith is meant to be lived.

• Why Tolkien still matters — and why Debra was “not allowed” to read The Hobbit / LOTR growing up

• How your “lens” changes what you see when you reread a story

• Fear vs. wonder: what changes when you read with hope instead of anxiety

• Fiction vs. nonfiction: why people use stories to escape — and why cookie-cutter writing dies

• Writing changes how you read (you start seeing the mechanics)

• “Don’t interrupt me” — the immersion problem (books vs. movies, living inside a story)

• Reading with others: book groups, shared stories, and why discussion makes ideas stick

• Penelope Wilcock’s Hawk and the Dove series: brokenness as a tool for healing others

• Integrating the shadow: using anger and obsession as fuel without letting it rule you

• Reading Scripture with context (and why Proverbs is “proverbs, not promises”)

• Translation problems: what gets lost when concepts don’t map cleanly into English

• What stories reveal about a culture’s values (black/white vs. “gray for the sake of gray”)

• Parenting and formation: raising kids with values before they can discern for themselves

• Name-calling → dehumanizing: how atrocities start small (and why it matters at home first)

• The Righteous Mind: why politics/religion get fused to identity and feel like personal attack

• Love as “seeking the best” — not “affirm whatever someone says”

• Corporate worship as formation: call-to-worship, conversation, and cultural “liturgies”

• Communion as communal grace (not wafer + cup) and why “remembering” is the opposite of dismembering

• Testimony and story: why shallow “two-line” faith talk doesn’t move people

• Gratitude, happiness, and how your internal posture affects everyone around you

• Fairy tales, warnings, and why the best stories still have teeth

• Faith & Formation

• Family, Fatherhood & Legacy

• Redemption & Integration

• Responsibility & Becoming

• Story & Identity 

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