Professor Ryan Thompson’s Book Featured on This American Life
The scholarship of Trinity Christian College Professor Ryan Thompson was featured on This American Life. The October 24, 2025 episode, The Thing about Things, contains a story that show producers discovered in Thompson’s book, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters & Photographs from the Petrified Forest. It is easy to see how Thompson’s book helped inspire the episode, which tells three stories about the unique hold that physical objects can have over a person. The book displays letters written by folks who returned stolen rocks from Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. These letters express a conviction, or at least a concern, that their original act of taking a rock has cursed them with bad luck.
Thompson explains that he happened upon these letters during a trip to Arizona. “My wife and I wound up with a spare day of travel before heading north to visit the Grand Canyon. We used that day to visit Meteor Crater and Petrified Forest National Park—two places I’d never been. In the Rainbow Forest Museum at Petrified Forest National Park at the time there was a small display with a couple conscience letters. That was my first introduction to the conscience letters.”
The letters and the stories behind them are certainly entertaining. But for the producers of This American Life and for Thompson himself, the whole situation has greater meaning as well. The episode offers a fuller view of one letter writer who stands by his belief that while the forbidden rock was in his possession, he was cursed—and that his fortunes reversed upon returning it. It is a striking tale of the importance that people can place on material objects, the theme of the episode. For Thompson, the interactions between the preserved rocks and their handlers are a metaphor for human interactions with the natural world more broadly during the Anthropocene. He notes, “humans have terraformed the earth in ways that will be visible in the fossil records for millennia to come.”
Ryan Thompson is a Professor of Art & Design and Department Chair at Trinity. He has written a second book with even more conscience letters entitled, AH AH: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Haleakalā and Hawai’i Volcanoes National Parks. This American Life is a beloved weekly public radio program and podcast from WBEZ Chicago.
