Thecuriousmanspodcast

What does God have to do with the American story?

The answer, as you'll discover in today's conversation, is complicated.

For four centuries, Americans have argued, preached, written, protested, prayed, rebelled, questioned, and sometimes fought over the meaning of the divine.

Puritan ministers, enslaved poets, abolitionists, presidents, transcendentalists, scientists, civil-rights leaders, comedians, LGBTQ+ writers, atheists, and pop stars have all wrestled with the same enormous questions:

Who—or what—is God?

What does God demand of us?

And perhaps most importantly, what happens when a nation invokes God while profoundly disagreeing about what God supposedly wants?

My guest is acclaimed editor and writer Ilan Stavans, whose extraordinary new anthology, A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands, brings together more than 400 years of American writing about the divine.

The collection includes more than 100 voices and an astonishing range of forms—from sermons, letters, essays, and speeches to poems, newspaper columns, comic strips, and song lyrics.

And these aren't voices that all agree.

Far from it.

The anthology moves across the ideological, religious, racial, cultural, and political spectrum—from Thomas Jefferson to Oliver Sacks, from abolitionists to atheists, and from historical prophets to contemporary cultural figures such as Lana Del Rey.

At a moment when millions of Americans describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, while belief in some form of higher power remains remarkably widespread, Stavans asks a fascinating question.

Not "Does God exist?"

But:

"What have Americans done with the idea of God—and what has that idea done to America?"

For decades, Africa has too often been viewed through the narrow lenses of crisis, conflict, and poverty. But today's guest has spent a lifetime making the case that the continent is far more accurately understood as a place of extraordinary opportunity, innovation, diplomacy, and global importance.

Joining me is Witney Schneidman—former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during the Clinton Administration, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, founder of an Africa-focused consulting practice, board member of the Corporate Council on Africa, and advisory board member of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.

In his new memoir, This Africa Idea: A Memoir of Discovery, Diplomacy, and Opportunity, Schneidman reflects on a career that placed him at the center of pivotal moments in modern African history—from South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy and the peace process in Angola to the creation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, one of the most significant U.S.-Africa trade initiatives in history.

Today we'll discuss diplomacy, economic development, leadership, entrepreneurship, and why Africa's future matters more than ever—not only to Africans, but to the entire world.

What does a mother do when survival means making impossible choices?

And what happens when a thirteen-year-old girl is forced to grow up in a world where childhood can disappear overnight?

Pauline Steinhorn's new book, Dreaming of the River: A Mother and Daughter's Fight for Survival During the Holocaust, tells the extraordinary true story of her mother, Bronia Feldman, and grandmother, Hajuta.

In September 1942, Bronia is torn away from her family and sent into the brutal forced-labor system of the HASAG munitions factory in occupied Poland.

But instead of thinking only about her own survival, Bronia becomes part of an underground medical lifeline, finding ways to help other prisoners survive.

Meanwhile, her husband and two young daughters have been left behind in the Skarzysko-Kamienna ghetto.

Thirteen-year-old Hajuta is sent to a nearby labor site.

When Bronia finds an opportunity to escape and reach her daughter, she faces an impossible choice: run into the forest and join the partisans—or return to the place she had just escaped.

Months later, mother and daughter are reunited.

But Hajuta is no longer the child Bronia remembers.

Their ordeal will eventually take them to Bergen-Belsen, where they continue to survive through extraordinary courage, sabotage, daring escapes, near-death rescues, and unexpected acts of humanity.

At the center of the story is the River Kamienna—the place where Bronia and Hajuta once danced, played music, and imagined a future.

The river becomes more than a memory.

It becomes a promise.

Today, I'm joined by Pauline Steinhorn to talk about Dreaming of the River, the journals left behind by her mother and grandmother, and the extraordinary process of reconstructing a family's story of survival, resistance, love, and hope.

What can the collapse of an ancient republic tell us about the health of the American republic today?

More than two thousand years ago, Rome was a functioning republic. It had elections, political institutions, a powerful Senate, ambitious leaders, and citizens who believed their system could endure.

It didn't.

The Roman Republic was ultimately replaced by autocracy—but, importantly, its collapse wasn't inevitable.

And that's the argument at the heart of Michelle Berenfeld's new book, Lessons from a Lost Republic: What Ancient Rome Can Teach Us About This American Moment.

Berenfeld is a professor of classics at Pitzer College and an archaeologist who has spent her career studying Rome's rise, transformation, and fall.

Her warning is striking: the forces that undermined the Roman Republic—concentrated wealth and power, endless warfare, political violence, and a legislature that gradually surrendered its own authority—can sound remarkably familiar today.

And there's another important connection.

The American Founders knew Roman history. They deliberately called our legislature the Senate. They built a Capitol. And they were deeply concerned about what happened when a republic surrendered too much power to a single leader.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary and the 2026 midterm elections, Berenfeld argues that the past isn't simply something to commemorate.

It may be a warning.

Today, we'll talk about what Rome can—and cannot—teach us about this American moment, why Congress may be the most important institution to watch, and whether a republic can recognize the warning signs before it's too late.

What happens when a political party loses the trust of the people it says it represents?

And perhaps even more importantly: how does it earn that trust back?

My guest today has some unusually direct answers.

Joe Cunningham made political history in 2018 when he became the first Democrat in nearly four decades to win South Carolina's 1st Congressional District. He went on to serve in Congress, where he developed a reputation for bipartisan work, before later running for governor of South Carolina.

Now Cunningham has written Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust—and How They Can Win It Back, a candid examination of what he believes went wrong with his party.

He argues that Democrats have become disconnected from ordinary voters, that affordability and economic security have been overshadowed by culture-war battles, and that the party has too often substituted messaging for listening.

And Cunningham isn't approaching this as a Washington pundit looking in from the outside.

He won where Democrats weren't supposed to win.

What if science finally proved that there really is an afterlife?

And what if it also proved that not everyone gets to experience it?

That's the provocative premise behind Don Schechter's debut novel, Ascendants.

Set in 2060, the novel imagines a world transformed by a scientific discovery: certain people are genetically destined to experience an afterlife, while everyone else—the so-called "biomasses"—is condemned to oblivion.

Suddenly, the oldest human questions aren't questions of faith anymore.

They're questions of genetics.

Who gets to live forever?

Who gets left behind?

And what happens to a society when scientists can determine which people are destined for eternity?

At the center of Ascendants is a powerful research institute pushing the boundaries of consciousness and morality, along with three very different people caught in its web: the visionary scientist who began it all, a grieving husband whose beliefs are being tested, and a young woman struggling to understand the world she's inherited.

Today, Don Schechter joins us to talk about Ascendants, the future of humanity, the ethics of scientific discovery, and perhaps the most terrifying question of all:

If you knew who was destined for an afterlife—and who wasn't—would that knowledge bring humanity together, or tear it apart?

What does a place do to you when you leave it behind—but it never really leaves you?

In 1990, a young journalist named Earl Swift set out to hike the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia. More than 2,000 miles later, he emerged changed: more disciplined, more resourceful, and deeply connected to the outdoors.

But Swift also carried something else home.

Early in his journey, he met two fellow hikers—friendly, capable, seemingly ordinary people who were doing everything right. Weeks later, those two hikers were murdered at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania.

The killer never adequately explained why.

For decades, Swift carried questions about what happened. Why them? What had happened at that campsite? Could the tragedy have happened to any of them? And how can a place renowned for its beauty and relative safety suddenly become the setting for unimaginable violence?

More than thirty years later, Swift returned to the Appalachian Trail.

This time, he was in his sixties, testing himself against the trail once again—and also trying to understand a mystery that had followed him for half his life.

His new book, Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail, is part adventure story, part true-crime investigation, and part meditation on memory, mortality, risk, and the strange hold that wild places can have on us.

Today, Earl Swift takes us back onto the Appalachian Trail.

What if one of the central assumptions about cancer is wrong?

For more than half a century, cancer research has largely focused on the idea that cancer begins with mutations in genes that disrupt the normal controls on cell growth.

But what if the fundamental problem isn't primarily genetic mutation?

What if cancer is instead rooted in something more basic: a breakdown in the organization and balance of chromosomes inside the cell?

That's the provocative argument at the heart of The Outsider: A Personal Odyssey into the Essence of Cancer, by biochemist Dr. David William Rasnick.

Rasnick takes readers on a journey through more than a century of cancer research, revisiting scientists whose ideas, he argues, were pushed aside as the field increasingly embraced the gene-mutation model.

At the center of that history is Theodor Boveri, whose early twentieth-century work connected abnormal chromosomes with cancer long before modern molecular biology made it possible to investigate the genome in detail.

But The Outsider is also a very personal story.

It's about what happens when a scientist challenges an established paradigm—and discovers that scientific disagreements aren't always settled simply by evidence.

Today, Dr. David Rasnick joins us to talk about cancer, chromosomes, scientific orthodoxy, the history of biomedical research, and the complicated question of what happens when an outsider believes he's seeing something the establishment has missed.

Conspiracy theories can feel like a uniquely modern phenomenon.

QAnon. Pizzagate. The "Big Lie." The Epstein Files. False claims about vaccines, medicines, elections, and political opponents.

But what if conspiracy theories aren't a new disease infecting American politics?

What if they've been part of the American political tradition from the very beginning?

In his new book, Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency, political historian Stephen F. Knott argues that some of the most powerful people in American history have not merely responded to conspiracy theories—they have helped create, amplify, and weaponize them.

From the Founding era through the modern presidency, Knott examines presidents and political leaders who portrayed their opponents as members of secret plots, shadowy cabals, or existential threats to the nation.

And that raises some uncomfortable questions.

Why are presidents so susceptible to conspiratorial thinking?

When does legitimate political suspicion become conspiracy theory?

Why do conspiracy theories become so politically powerful?

And what happens to democracy when the person occupying the Oval Office becomes, as Knott puts it, "Conspirator in Chief"?

Today, Stephen Knott joins us to explore the long, strange, and sometimes disturbing history of conspiracy theories in the American presidency.

Rock 'n' roll has always had a dark side.

Behind the music, the fame, the drugs, the excess, and the mythology are stories of mysterious deaths, unexplained events, strange symbols, secretive organizations, and rumors that have refused to die.

Was that simply the inevitable mythology that grows around enormously famous musicians?

Or are there stories hiding beneath the official versions of events that deserve another look?

Author and podcast host Richard Syreet explores those questions in Tales from The Rock & Roll Twilight Zone: Eerie Enigmas and Supernatural Secrets from Rock's Darkest Corners.

Syreet takes readers into some of the most mysterious episodes in rock history, revisiting stories surrounding artists including The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Elvis Presley, and others.

His investigation explores alleged cover-ups, unexplained deaths, intelligence connections, occult symbolism, numerology, corporate influence, and the persistent idea that popular music has sometimes been used for purposes extending far beyond entertainment.

But perhaps the most interesting question is not simply "Is the conspiracy true?"

It's "How do we determine what is actually evidence—and what is mythology?"

Today, Richard Syreet joins us to explore the strange, unsettling, and sometimes downright bizarre corners of rock history.