Wonder Cabinet
av Wonder Cabinet Productions
Finding Wonder in Dying with Roshi Joan Halifax
Om denne podkasten
Wonder Cabinet is an independent podcast from Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson, Peabody Award-winning creators of public radio's To The Best Of Our Knowledge. For 35 years, that show brought long-form conversations to 200+ stations nationwide; its interviews are now archived in the Library of Congress.
Episodes feature intimate, long-form conversations with scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists who are re-imagining our relationship with the planet. Some study black holes or quantum entanglement; others map mycelial networks or count ancient tree rings. And some explore dream worlds, myths, and fairy tales to revive ways of knowing that challenge what we think we understand about the nature of reality.
The name references Enlightenment-era cabinets of curiosities—private collections of shells, fossils, astronomical instruments, and saints' relics that existed at a moment when the scientific revolution was still in conversation with older ways of knowing the world. Today, another shift is taking place, as mechanistic models give way to more holistic, relational understandings of life on a sentient planet. Wonder Cabinet lives at that threshold.
About the hosts
Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson co-founded To The Best Of Our Knowledge. Steve hosts Luminous, a podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics, and is the author of Atoms and Eden.
Learn more at wondercabinetproductions.com.
Episoder
De 20 nyeste av 28 episoder
- Finding Wonder in Dying with Roshi Joan Halifax · 30 min · Sesong 1 Episode 27Joan Halifax loves Wordsworth’s summons to “see into the life of things.” For the Buddhist abbot of Upaya Zen Center, this kind of deep seeing has been a lifelong pursuit, and it…
- Maria Popova on 20 Years of 'The Marginalian' · 48 min · Sesong 1 Episode 26Twenty years ago, Maria Popova was newly arrived in the US and working four jobs to pay for college. Lonely and disoriented, she started keeping a record of her search for…
- Writing an Enchanted Landscape with Daniel Mason · 47 min · Sesong 1 Episode 25How does a landscape come alive and even feel enchanted? Bestselling author Daniel Mason explores this question in his novels “Country People” and “North Woods.” Both are steeped…
- Being Alive with Melanie Challenger · 36 min · Sesong 1 Episode 24Our obsession with the dream of artificial, disembodied intelligence is deadening our experience of life itself. Melanie Challenger — a philosopher, naturalist and National…
- The Power of Ritual with Rabbi Geoff Mitelman · 37 min · Sesong 1 Episode 23What kind of truth can a sacred text offer about the world? Rabbi Geoff Mitelman reads the Torah as poetry — open to multiple interpretations and evoking a sense of…
- Tree Thinking with Robert Moor · 51 min · Sesong 1 Episode 22Can you imagine being a tree? Robert Moor has spent years trying—climbing into their canopies, studying their biology and learning to see trees in ways most of us don’t. He…
- The Ecowomanist Theology of Rev. Dr. Melanie L. Harris · 36 min · Sesong 1 Episode 21Rev. Dr. Melanie Harris is a professor of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies at Wake Forest University, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and one…
- Poetry Against Despair with Christian Wiman · 45 min · Sesong 1 Episode 20How do you find joy in suffering? That’s one of the questions Christian Wiman explores in his poetry and his life. The former editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman is the author of…
- Chasing Wilderness with Cal Flyn (and Gary Snyder) · 1 t 0 min · Sesong 1 Episode 19For thousands of years, people have dreamed of walking off the map — lighting out for the remote unknown, into landscapes untouched and untamed. The classic wilderness quest is…
- The Conscious Universe: Panpsychism with Philip Goff · 43 min · Sesong 1 Episode 18What if consciousness isn't something that emerges from the brain—but is embedded in the fabric of reality itself? That's the provocative idea behind panpsychism— that…
- The Spiritual Ecology of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee · 51 min · Sesong 1 Episode 17Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up in London with a Russian Sufi mystic living downstairs, seekers showing up at all hours and meditation happening constantly. Then his family moved to…
- An Evening of Wonder with Alan Lightman · 47 min · Sesong 1 Episode 16What happens when a physicist experiences a moment of transcendence that science cannot explain? Alan Lightman has spent much of his life exploring the mysteries of the…
- Rewilding Attention with D. Graham Burnett · 39 min · Sesong 1 Episode 15We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we…
- Christof Koch on the Cosmic Toad · 31 min · Sesong 1 Episode 14What happens when one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has a mystical experience that upends his understanding of reality? In the 1990s, Christof Koch helped launch the…
- Why We Need Fairy Tales Now — with Sharon Blackie · 45 min · Sesong 1 Episode 13Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters. In her new book, “Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now,” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the…
- Rebecca Henderson: Can Capitalism Save the World It’s Destroying? · 50 min · Sesong 1 Episode 12Can capitalism save the world it's destroying? Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, she…
- Caroline Winterer: Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul · 37 min · Sesong 1 Episode 11T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or…
- Mary-Jane Rubenstein: Pantheism and the Godness of Nature · 42 min · Sesong 1 Episode 10What if nature isn’t just alive—but divine? Pantheism, once branded heresy, is finding new adherents among those who don’t consider themselves religious but still sense something…
- Dekila Chungyalpa on the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth · 39 min · Sesong 1 Episode 9Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance…
- Manvir Singh: Was Shamanism the First Religion? · 34 min · Sesong 1 Episode 8Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond…
