Religion on the Mind – Ep. 358: "When Fiction Reveals a Deeper Truth"

Host: Dr. Dan Koch
Guests: Cameron Reed & Gabe Cortez
Release Date: November 6, 2025

Episode Overview

This special patron-only episode is the first in what Dr. Dan Koch hopes will be a series exploring short literary fiction as a lens for understanding psychology, religion, and spirituality. Together with his brother-in-law Cameron Reed and close friend and fellow therapist Gabe Cortez, Dan discusses why fiction matters—how it delivers a different kind of truth than nonfiction, uniquely deepens empathy, and has always been central to human meaning-making. The conversation serves as a warmup for a focused discussion of the short story "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker, set for the second half of the episode.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Value of Reading Fiction

• Fiction is More Than Entertainment

  • The hosts confront the common belief that fiction is a "luxury" or mere escapism, often deprioritized in favor of nonfiction intended for "productive" learning.
  • Dan confesses (07:59) how many people he meets see fiction as a treat to be enjoyed only when there's nothing "better" to do, but he finds this mindset limiting and even a bit troubling.

• The Challenge and Reward of Fiction

  • Reading fiction is acknowledged as challenging—even for regular readers. Yet, it's precisely this challenge that brings value, prompting active engagement of the imagination and fostering personal growth.
  • “It’s amazing how, like, that’s where I learned the most stuff, you know, is fiction. … It’s accessible, it’s digestible, it’s entertaining … but it’s also educational.” — Cameron Reed (10:10)

• Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Embodied Learning

  • While nonfiction may instruct, fiction shows—allowing readers to feel and experience realities rather than just being told about them.
  • “In a good work of fiction, you feel like someone is showing me something and I’m feeling something ... like, I feel like I’m getting to know life better.” — Dr. Dan Koch (11:16)

Fiction as a Tool for Empathy and Embodied Experience

• Perspective-Taking & Empathy

  • The hosts discuss fiction’s unique ability to place the reader "in someone else's shoes," accessing embodied experiences across identity, context, and emotion.
  • Cameron recalls being “the fucking wolf” in Jack London’s White Fang (15:34), and the awe he felt as a child, experiencing the world through the wolf pup's eyes.
  • “To me, that’s the power of fiction.… It is totally embodied … It is experienced.… It is an exercise in imagining someone else’s life, seeing the world from their perspective.” — Cameron Reed (17:52)

• Moral and Spiritual Significance

  • This empathy-building fosters not only personal growth but moral development—as fiction exercises the capacity to understand, feel for, and relate to others.

Truth in Storytelling: Show, Don’t Tell

• The Deeper Truth of Stories

  • Fiction is often truer than fact, in the sense that it captures the lived reality, ambiguity, and complexity of human experience that cannot be easily summarized or theorized.
  • The group notes how in fiction, questions like “Is that really true?” refer to emotional and psychological authenticity, not literal fact.
  • "Is it true to the reality of it? And in that sense, I think that both fiction and nonfiction are aiming to get at truth. They do it differently. It's a different kind of a truth." — Dr. Dan Koch (19:38)

• Jesus and Parables

  • Dan draws on Jesus’s reliance on parables, not didactic lectures, to communicate profound truths: “There are truths that can only be expressed in allegory or story.” (19:38)

The Universality of Storytelling

• Stories as Human Foundations

  • The universality of storytelling is highlighted—not only in Christianity (with parables and biblical narratives) but as foundational across global cultures.
  • “Story has been such a huge foundational, formative, deep part of how we’ve come to know ourselves as humans globally, but also in specific cultures.” — Cameron Reed (22:24)

• Stories in Religion and Tradition

  • From the Bible’s vast collection of stories, to the Jewish tradition of wrestling and wrestling again with texts for new meaning (midrash is alluded to), the group agrees stories offer endless interpretative richness and communal engagement.

Fiction as Communal and Dynamic Meaning-Making

• Fiction is Rich and Ambiguous

  • Good stories resist neat reduction to abstract explanations (like a DSM diagnosis or a single interpretive frame), remaining open to debate, reinterpretation, and conversation.
  • “If [story] is any good, [it] is going to resist sort of reductionistic explanations … you can debate them endlessly.” — Cameron Reed (25:15)

• Fiction as Communal Experience

  • Dan references Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, summarizing the idea that "humans were made for gossip” (i.e., for sharing and collectively interpreting stories) (24:01).

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “Do you have time to breathe oxygen? Do you have time to look at a sunset? … Yeah, so people think of maybe … is it because of genre fiction that people think of reading? I mean, honestly, now, with the ubiquity of screens … if anybody’s reading, I think, okay, good on ya.”
  — Gabe Cortez (09:08)

• “Empathy feels also really unique. I don’t think you’re naming empathy specifically, but maybe that’s … (17:01)”
  — Dr. Dan Koch (to Cameron)

• “And to me, that’s why it’s so important … It is an exercise in imagining someone else’s life, seeing the world from their perspective … expanding our empathetic capacity.”
  — Cameron Reed (17:52)

• “Jesus told parables. You know, he could have given doctrine or, you know, didactics. … he didn’t. He’s like, yeah, it’s sort of like a farmer, you know, and like, there’s, I think, deep wisdom in that. There are truths that can only be expressed in allegory or story.”
  — Dr. Dan Koch (21:06)

Notable Timestamps

• 02:03: Dan addresses minor technical issues with audio, reassures listeners about sound quality, and introduces the episode's theme
• 05:21–07:35: Purpose of new fiction series; why short stories were chosen; Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” as the first feature
• 09:08: The struggle and misconception about fiction as "just for fun" or lower-value than nonfiction (Gabe)
• 10:10–11:16: Cameron describes his return to fiction and how it’s the source of his deepest learning
• 15:15–17:52: Embodied experience through fiction; empathy as a core outcome (Cam’s “White Fang” example)
• 19:38–22:24: Truth in fiction vs. nonfiction; Jesus’s parables as model for story's power
• 22:24–23:58: Stories as foundational to humanity; religious stories as cultural bedrock
• 24:01–26:00: Fiction as communal, dynamic; ambiguity and richness that resist easy reduction

Takeaways for the Listener

• This episode passionately upholds the value of fiction not only for entertainment but for personal, psychological, and spiritual insight.
• Through stories, we see and feel realities that lectures or nonfiction summary cannot convey; fiction uniquely nurtures empathy.
• Storytelling is a universal human phenomenon at the heart of culture and religion, operating as a vital, communal, and dynamic process of meaning-making.
• For deeper truth, richer empathy, and endless interpretive dialogue, fiction is irreplaceable.