255: Unabridged Interview: Matt Lee

No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp

Lee Camp

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 555 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2026

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is our unabridged interview with Matt Lee. What if flourishing isn’t something you achieve, but something you share? Sociologist and human flourishing scholar Matthew T. Lee reflects on his unlikely journey from studying homicide to exploring love as a social practice. Drawing on research, philosophy, and lived experience, he challenges individualistic definitions of success and offers a richer vision rooted in community, dialogue, and mutual care. He insists that all flourishing is mutual. Key Ideas: -Flourish Together or Not at All True human flourishing is mutual, it cannot exist at the expense of others or the world around us. -From Isolation to Interdependence His “forest” metaphor reveals that our lives are deeply interconnected, sharing resources and meaning beneath the surface. -Love as a Social Practice Flourishing grows through lived practices of love, not just ideas, especially in restorative justice and everyday relationships. -Rethink Success and Happiness The Global Flourishing study has found that material wealth and personal satisfaction alone are insufficient; flourishing includes virtue, relationships, and contribution to others. -Dialogue Over Monologue Transformation begins when we move beyond certainty and enter into genuine dialogue that reshapes how we see others and ourselves. -Build Small Communities of Hope Change doesn’t start at scale; it begins with small, intentional communities practicing a better way of being human. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Show Notes, Resources and Transcript⁠⁠ for abridged episode with Matt Lee ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join NSE+⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — our subscriber-only community — for ad-free listening, member-only bonus content, and early access to live show tickets. Your membership helps make No Small Endeavor sustainable. 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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, Lee Seacamp here. You're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our unabridged
0:07.3	interview with Professor Matt Lee. Matt has appointments both at Harvard and Baylor University.
0:14.4	We got to sit down in person with Matt out at Baylor. We were generously invited to come out to
0:19.6	Baylor for a conference on AI and Being
0:22.4	Human, hosted by the Institute for Faith and Learning there at Baylor. I'm grateful for the
0:27.9	invitation of professors Elizabeth Kincaid and Professor John Barton, and for the lovely time we had
0:33.8	there in Baylor getting to sit down with a lot of remarkable folks, and you'll be hearing a variety of outputs from those interviews here in the next number of weeks on No
0:42.4	Small Endeavor. This conversation with Matt was really moving and really quite beautiful. Matt
0:47.2	started out as doing kind of work in criminology, studying murder, and looking at the sort of
0:53.1	social dynamics in communities around murder,
0:56.5	and then found that, as he says in the interview, that looking into that abyss,
1:01.3	the abyss stares back into oneself and that it was not a healthy or helpful way to spend his days
1:07.0	and spend his vocation.
1:09.0	And so he began asking other questions, more fruitful questions, questions about human flourishing,
1:14.6	questions about what it might mean to think of love as a social practice, a sociology of love, even if you will.
1:21.6	And so we discussed a lot of remarkable ways to think about that question in this interview.
1:26.6	I especially took
1:28.1	away from him this insistence that we must not think of flourishing through a potted plant metaphor.
1:36.2	This sticks out to me because I think a lot of times, you know, naturally people can ask,
1:40.1	what do we mean by flourishing? And I always think, well, think about a potted plant, right,
1:45.1	that you can tell looking at your potted plants, whether it's flourishing, which is related to the
1:49.8	word flower, right? You can tell whether it's flourishing or not by looking at it, paying attention
	...

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