The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States.

Since it was established in 1861, there have been 3,517 people awarded with the Medal. I'm Malcolm Gladwell and our new podcast from

Pushkin Industries and I Heart Media is about those heroes. What they did, what

it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Listen to Medal of Honor stories of courage wherever you get your podcast.

When it comes down to it,

almost every religion out there sets forth an idea of what it means to be a good person.

But while we can usually agree on the benefits of virtue, who doesn't want to be kind and generous?

It's the flip side, the idea of sin that people have a lot of mixed feelings about.

It's just a very loaded word, isn't it?

We made you think of it as either quite a horrifying concept that's been used to beat people up with, to impose guilt from the outside

to make them feel unclean or unworthy. Or it sounds like lingerie and cupcakes and calories.

Oh, it's a bit simple.

So it was not, uh, seven deadly sins was not something. I thought that's a thing I'm desperate to talk about.

And then they massively surprised me.

Elizabeth Oldfield is host of the Sacred Podcast and the author of Fully Alive, tending to the soul in turbulent times,

a book that revisits and reinterprets Christianity's Seven Deadly Sins. Elizabeth wasn't always a devout Christian. She lost her faith

while working as a religion writer for the BBC. I was tasked with being the

researcher on a particular episode of a big drama series

that was going to be made of the Bible and just had a utter and completely

devastating loss of faith because the book was not what I thought it was and therefore God wasn't what I thought

God was and I had clearly been a fool and ignorant and naive and now was the time to sort of let go of all the

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