Wonder Cabinet

Our obsession with the dream of artificial, disembodied intelligence is deadening our experience of life itself. Melanie Challenger — a philosopher, naturalist and National Geographic Explorer —  says it’s time to let go of the centuries-old human history of pretending we’re not animals, of separating ourselves from the rest of the natural world. The essence of life, she says, is being a body — the source of the agency, purpose and intelligence that defines every living being, from the plant turning toward the sun to the hawk diving for its prey, to the child reaching for her mother. 

In two poetic and rigorously argued books, “How To Be Animal," and “Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Natural World," Challenger makes the case for restoring meaning to organisms — a project that is both scientific, philosophical, and profoundly moral. It also offers a path toward re-enchantment: a way to think about how to revive a sense of the pulsating aliveness that surrounds us, and about what might follow if we did.  

In this conversation, Challenger talks about her early work with survivors of genocide and war crimes, which led her to think deeply about the psychology of dehumanization. She recounts her first, lyrical trips as a naturalist and writer-in-residence in the Sub Antarctic and following blue whales off the coast of Costa Rica. And she talks about her re-discovery of Aristotle, the ancient philosopher whose concept of life as “en-soulment” showed her how to redefine what it means to be alive.  

This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.

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00:00:00 Intro
00:05:00 War Witness to Naturalist
00:18:00 Beyond the Machine Body
00:27:00 Sequoia Seed and Aristotle

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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 Sinai and Synapses, an organization building bridges between science and religion, particularly Judaism. He reads the creation story in Genesis as a profoundly mysterious text — complementary to the scientific account of the Big Bang.

Mitelman doesn’t dwell on big metaphysical questions such as the nature of God or ultimate reality. Instead, he turns toward age-old rituals — the songs, stories and ceremonies that have been practiced within Jewish communities for centuries. Why do we return to these rituals year after year?

At a time when many people have abandoned organized religion, often describing themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” Mitelman says Judaism is more akin to being “religious but not spiritual.” In this conversation, we explore the power of ritual — and how shared practices can create meaning and build community.

This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.

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00:00:00 A Shabbat Ritual in Tuscany
00:04:10 Torah as Poetry, Not Science
00:09:15 Genesis and the Big Bang
00:19:57 God, Ritual, and Community

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 time in trees, time slows down—and branching and pruning can become life lessons. He’s interested not just in how trees grow, but in what they might teach us about ourselves. In his book In Trees, he says his goal isn’t to anthropomorphize trees but to “arborize” humanity.

Moor has taken his obsession with trees to unusual places: climbing to the tops of giant sequoias; traveling to Tokyo to meet master bonsai artists; becoming a “tree sitter” to protest an oil pipeline. He’s fascinated by “family trees” and Darwin’s Tree of Life, and by our own evolutionary history in the trees of Africa. He traveled to Ethiopia to see Lucy, the famous 3-million-year-old fossil skeleton, and to Tanzania to sleep in a chimpanzee nest. (It was a miserable experience.)

He knows something about living among trees: 13 years ago, he and his husband moved from New York City to a cabin in the woods of British Columbia—and never left.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:07:20 Climbers and Bonsai Masters
00:22:15 Environmentalism's Shadow History
00:28:45 Sleeping in a Chimpanzee Nest
00:37:20 Tree Sitters and Hope

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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 philosophy centering the voices, wisdom, and spiritual practices of Black women and women of color.

In this conversation, Harris traces her own eco-memories back to Dearfield, Colorado, one of the historic Black-owned farming settlements founded by families who migrated west during the Great Migration — including her own grandparents. She reflects on growing up with a rare and precious connection to land and growing things, even as her family navigated the very real dangers racism posed to simply being outdoors in rural America.

Harris speaks candidly about how, in many African American communities, painful histories tied to slavery and cotton have led families to intentionally distance children from the land — a protective severing that ecowomanism seeks to gently repair. Drawing on her mother's practice of singing and humming to plants, she describes music, spirituality and land stewardship as deeply entwined threads of Black religious life.

She also talks about the hidden ecological history of Black women and why it matters to see  women like Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer not just as liberators and Civil Rights leaders, but as environmentalists who understood the connection between racial justice and earth justice. 

The episode closes with a meditation on the high desert of New Mexico, where the conversation was recorded – a portrait of land, memory, grief and grace held together.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. 

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:00 Roots, Roses and Ecowomanism
00:10:55 Harriet Tubman, Environmentalist
00:17:30 The Lynching Tree and What Needs Repair
00:27:10 The Divine Feminine and the Desert

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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 Yale Divinity School. He’s been called “the most important Christian writer in America,” though his relationship with God is marked by uncertainty as much as faith. That tension runs through his poetry, where mystical experience, doubt, suffering, and joy continually collide.

His understanding of mortality is also shaped by a 20-year battle with cancer. Diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma and initially given only a few years to live, Wiman has come close to death several times. Yet he speaks about suffering not simply as something to endure, but as a strange territory in which beauty and wonder can sometimes be found.

Wiman craves direct experiences of the world, but he finds that writing poetry helps him fully appreciate these fleeting moments of awe and wonder. A frosted hosta, an old candlestick, the trills of a red-winged blackbird—small encounters like these can open onto deeper questions about meaning, eternity, and what Wordsworth called “seeing into the life of things.”

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00:00:00 Intro
00:02:40 Poetry, Awe and Wonder
00:15:10 Twenty Years Battling Cancer
00:21:55 Joy in Suffering
00:30:45 Seeing Into the Life of Things
00:39:40 A Last Poem and Farewell

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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 changed. It's woven into ancient spiritual texts, medieval myths, and European accounts of the so-called "New World."

But wilderness is an idea as slippery as it is powerful — and wilderness preservation is a complicated and often costly ideal. 

That's the territory Cal Flyn explores in her new book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. An award-winning writer, Flyn has traveled — often alone — into some of the most remote and forbidding places on Earth: a desert monastery on Mount Sinai, deep into the Amazon rainforest, up a Tibetan mountain pass, and inside an erupting Icelandic volcano. She gets there by river skiff, deep-sea submersible, helicopter, and horseback, and along the way she finds moments of sheer wonder — and real danger.

We talk with Flyn about the history of this ancient idea and why humans keep chasing it. With nearly 8 billion people on the planet, almost no place is truly untouched. So what IS wilderness? Why do we keep seeking it? And who pays the price? 

Plus: 

Steve talks with legendary poet and environmental writer Gary Snyder — now 96, once a friend of the Beats and a Zen apprentice in 1950s Japan — about his classic book The Practice of the Wild. Snyder also reads two poems. This is an excerpt from an archival conversation.  

The original aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. This Wonder Cabinet episode was not funded, endorsed or affiliated with Wisconsin Public Media or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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00:00:00 In Search of Wilderness
00:03:00 Cal Flyn on The Savage Landscape
00:32:40 The Sublime, Taboos and Sacred Groves
00:49:55 From the TTBOOK Archive: Gary Snyder
01:00:15 Credits and Farewell

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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 cosmos. Philosopher Philip Goff, one of panpsychism’s leading advocates, argues that it offers the best solution to one of science's deepest mysteries: how consciousness arises at all. We also hear  from novelist Philip Pullman, whose  fantasy series His Dark Materials was partly inspired by panpsychism. 

Goff reflects on another surprising development in his own thinking: his recent turn toward the Eastern Orthodox Church and what he calls "heretical Christianity.” He also describes how a profound  psychedelic experience shook him to the core—and may have revealed a deeper reality. 

The first interview with Goff was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. The interview with Philip Pullman originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. This Wonder Cabinet episode was not funded, endorsed or affiliated with Wisconsin Public Media or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:00 What Is Panpsychism?
00:17:30 Heretical Christianity
00:29:40 A Psychedelic Awakening
00:38:25 The Conscious Universe, Confirmed

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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 surf and fell in love with wilderness.  

Today, Emmanuel is the founder, executive editor and podcast host of Emergence Magazine – for nearly a decade, one of the most important venues for spiritually-infused ecological writing.  His new book, Remembering Earth, is both a meditation on the sacred nature of the living world and a practical guide to re-entering it.  

In this conversation,  we explore Sufism's radical vision of the divine as intimate and immanent, rather than distant and transcendent. We also talk about jazz — Emmanuel dropped out of school at age 16 to play acoustic bass — and the liminal space of creative improvisation.  Other stops along the way:  the epigenetic memory of birdsong, how breath and walking can become a form of prayer; what dreams are and where they come from; and the boundlessness of Earth’s love. 

Note:  Wonder Cabinet is taking a summer break.  We’ll be back in August with new episodes.

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00:00:00 The Magic We've Forgotten
00:02:15 Growing Up With a Guru
00:06:55 One River, Many Names
00:15:55 Spiritual Ecology and Practice
00:29:05 Nightingales, Jazz, and Dreams

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 govern reality. A physicist, novelist and longtime professor at MIT, he's fascinated by the transformative power of awe and wonder.

In this live conversation recorded at New York's Morgan Library, Lightman reflects on extraordinary encounters in nature—from a startling moment with two ospreys to a solitary night beneath the stars—that shook him to the core and left him feeling as though he had somehow "fallen into infinity." Calling himself a "spiritual materialist," he seeks to bridge the divide between science and religion, between mathematics and art.

Can a scientific worldview make room for awe, transcendence, and mystical experience? Lightman says these fleeting moments reveal something essential about being human: our longing to connect with something larger than ourselves.

This event at the Morgan Library was co-sponsored by the Nour Foundation as part of our series “Spirituality in the Age of Science: Conversations on God, Transcendence and Mortality.”

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0:00 Introduction
2:40 The Osprey Encounter
9:40 Science And Religion
13:30 Scientist And Novelist
28:50 The Religious Impulse
36:50 Evolution And Consciousness

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 Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.

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0:00 Introduction
3:00 Human Fracking
27:30 Attention as Generosity
30:55 Wonder and Disenchantment