Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus · The Sophia Society

This is Going to Hurt w/ Bekah McNeel

·58 min·3 clips

Becca argues compassion is "to feel with," not just a virtue of pity or mercy.

Jonathan Blankenship opens on the burden of witness. Becca McNeil answers by naming the rooms she has sat in as a reporter, from a migrant welcome center to a kitchen table, and by trying to put language to how private moments become public stories without losing their humanity. The work sounds ordinary, but the conversation keeps treating it as morally serious, because each room raises the same question: how do you communicate compassion to people who were never there? The suffering stays central. McNeil talks about Uvalde, Detroit, and the slow accumulation of scenes that change a person’s instincts about power and cruelty. She does not flatter herself. She says the job has made her less tolerant of bullies and more alert to the loneliness under a lot of defensiveness. That matters. When the host presses on the fear of being wrong, she connects certainty to community and shows how rejection can start to feel like spiritual death. The tone softens. Instead of turning disagreement into a contest, the episode asks what it means to admit error without collapsing into shame. Compassion returns. McNeil keeps bringing the conversation back to the people in the room and to the responsibility of telling the truth without hardening into contempt. The book title hangs over everything. This Is Going to Hurt becomes a plain description of what reporting, memory, and care cost the person doing the listening. The host keeps pressing the moral stakes. He asks how faith language can repair harm instead of hiding it. The ending lands. It leaves you with the sense that compassion is a practice, not a mood, and that telling the truth still matters when the truth hurts.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation about reporting on suffering, truth, and the fear of being wrong.

The episode follows Bekah McNeel as a journalist who has spent time in rooms where people are grieving, and it stays close to the strain of carrying those stories back out into public view.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a faith conversation that sits with suffering and keeps compassion in view.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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