Emboldening our Compassion
A Review of
When Stories Wound: Responsible Living in a Polarized World
Nathaniel Samuel
Paperback: Liturgical Press, 2025
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Reviewed by Cynthia Wallace
As the current U.S. administration demands DEI witch hunts and certain online Christians reprise debates about the so-called “sin of empathy,” Nathaniel Samuel’s new book, When Stories Wound: Responsible Living in a Polarized World could not be timelier. In just 115 pages, Samuel presents an urgent reminder: humans are uniquely storytelling creatures, prone to organizing our experience of the world into narratives that give shape and meaning to our lives. These “deep stories” can serve us and others, but they can also slide into stereotypes and falsity that do serious harm, undergirding prejudices, colonial projects, structures of injustice, and apathy on a global scale. The answer to this challenge is a Samaritan love that “crosses the road” to care about others’ suffering, attending to their actual stories and taking responsibility to enact life-giving love.
Samuel argues that our current challenges are not the problem of polarization, but the way polarization works in tandem with stories that wound vulnerable people. When we focus too heavily on policy or fact-based rationality, he insists, we ignore the role our deep stories play—at the emotional, precognitive level—to motivate our ways of being in the world and structuring society. In this way, the book implicitly steps into longstanding debates about the function of symbolic versus material approaches to injustice, arguing for a more holistic stance that highlights story and meaning-making, but never apart from embodied actions. Love, in Samuel’s vision, is always an activity.
There are many ways into these conversations about embracing better stories about others and ourselves– including narrative theology– which Samuel cites at length in one particularly rich footnote, but also narrative philosophy, cognitive psychology, and recent work on the neuroscience of empathy, to name just a few.
I couldn’t help thinking of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s widely viewed TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” as a rich conversation partner for this book. Indeed, When Stories Wound serves as a practical theology companion text to recent books in other disciplines like Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World by john a. powell and Stephen Menendian, or See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love by Valarie Kaur. Slightly older companion texts include Suzanne Keene’s Empathy and the Novel and John Paul Lederach’s now classic The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Despite their diverse methodologies, these books all share Samuel’s conviction about the wounding and healing power of story as well as the choice to attend to others with love.
What Samuel offers to this growing multi-disciplinary conversation is an accessible introduction to his major concepts from within a specifically Christian frame that draws its ethical model from Jesus’s teachings and examples. My favourite sections are the most vividly particular, like when Samuel shares parts of his own autobiographical story growing up on the island of St. Lucia, as well as addressing the Caribbean island’s longer colonial history. He offers a stunning comparison of two church paintings, one of faded European saints and one of the Holy Family surrounded by St. Lucians engaged in their daily lives, a powerfully inculturated story that speaks of strength in the face of wounds. In later chapters, Samuel explicates sociologist Christian Smith’s critical realist personalism to offer a theoretical grounding for humans’ narrative capabilities. I also especially appreciate the occasions when the book offers thickly populated footnotes, which I always welcome as a scholar because I love to trace down interesting citations. The book is a little uneven in this regard, but I think its focus on its own primary argument over heavy citation probably keeps the emphasis where Samuel wants it: on the bigger-picture claim that we are story-making creatures and need to take responsibility, even in the vast complexities of global late modernity, to cross the road and love.
To invite this love, Samuel ends the book by explaining a series of responsibilities: (1) the responsibility of memory, (2) the responsibility of awareness, and (3) the responsibility of anticipation. These responsibilities involve purposely seeking to hear and understand the stories of those who have been most wounded in the past and those who are most wounded in the present, even across great distances, even when this seeking and listening puts our comfort at risk. They also involve considering the future, rooting our current actions in hope for generations to come. Samuel notes that these activities will be riskier for some than others, especially those who have themselves been most wounded by false stories, but tending to the truth of the past and anchoring oneself in hope for the future can be an act of healing and community care.
Reflecting on these calls to responsibility in March 2025, I suspect they are even more difficult now than ever. They are also more urgently needed as the United States federal government cracks down on many of the book’s key terms, like “marginalized,” “equity,” “biases,” “stereotypes,” and “traumatic.” I’m left to ponder how we can get Samuel’s invitation into the hands that need it most. In his recent book Strange Worship: Six Steps for Challenging Christian Nationalism, Drew Strait considers precisely this challenge, drawing on research in the social sciences to argue that the most productive use of our energy is to focus on conversations not with the most radically polarized but with those in the middle of the spectrum, who tend to be more open to the possibility of change. Strait reminds us that the church itself is one of the most potent sites of this kind of conversation and potential healing in the wake of wounding deep stories. My hope is that Samuel’s book might find its way into the hands of clergy, leaders, and others who can extend its invitation to those whose hearts have room to receive the challenge.
I’m also pondering what the three responsibilities Samuel ends with look like in my own life as a parent, a professor, an occasional preacher, and a writer. I am steeped in the kinds of stories Samuel calls us to attend to. I research and teach courses in decolonizing and transnational literatures and theory, life writing, women writers, and intersectional feminist theory, as well as Christianity, ethics, and justice. From pulpits and lecterns and around my dinner table, I introduce listeners to stories meant to challenge us, to wake us up, to embolden our compassion and accountabilities, our sense of shared humanity and respect for difference. And still, there are so many places apathy creeps into my life, so many moments I cross the proverbial street to avoid a confrontation with my own responsibility. Samuel invites me, yet again, to consider the stories I live inside of, to question my own tired assumptions, to wake up to the gift of love and the growth that produces fruit. His pastoral theology takes me back to the basic commands of my faith: love. Love, even against the headwinds of this exhausting new political storm. Love, especially now, because Jesus’s teaching could not be more clear: we are all each other’s neighbors.
Cynthia Wallace
Cynthia R. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Irene and Doug Schmeiser Centre for Faith, Reason, Peace, and Justice at St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. She is author of the books Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering and The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil. You can follow her at @cynthiarwallace across social media platforms and find her free newsletter at AgonisticCommunion.substack.com.
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