What 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 transcendence, even magic.Mitelman is a Reform rabbi and the founding director of…

Can 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 considers himself a “tree person.”Moor believes that when you spend a lot of…

Rev. 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 of the founders of ecowomanism — a theology and environmental…

How 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 seven books of poetry, including his latest, The Dance. He also teaches at…

For 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 as old as literature itself: you go into the wild, and you come out…

What 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 consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the…

Emmanuel 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 a coastal redwood forest in Northern California, where he learned to…

What 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 universe—from black holes and the nature of time to the fundamental laws that…

We 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 talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The…

What 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 modern science of consciousness, searching for the neural basis of…

Sharon 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 past. Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead…

Can 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 has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that…

T-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 gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it:…

What 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 sacred and wondrous in the living world.Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar…

Imagine 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.In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum…

Shamanism 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 the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can…

For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if…

What if a river is alive–but we’ve forgotten how to recognize it?This is the radical idea at the heart of the global “rights of nature” movement, which seeks to grant rivers, forests and ecosystems legal standing. Rooted in ancient traditions and…

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin both saw nature as alive with mystery – and treated wonder as a way of knowing. Literary scholar and science historian Renee Bergland, author of "Natural Magic," is our guide to the forgotten kinship between the…

What if dying is not an ending, but a moment of radical clarity? In his new novel "Vigil," George Saunders conjures a strange and often comic world of bickering angels visiting a dying, deeply flawed man—debating and waiting to see whether he can…