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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.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Long-form talks on wonder and transcendence • Science–spirituality intersections • Ecology, climate, sacred Earth • Consciousness, psychedelics, altered states • Myth, fairy tales, imaginal worlds • Deep time, evolution, natural history • Attention, ethics, social change • Nature rights, capitalism reformThis podcast presents long-form conversations with scientists, scholars, writers, and artists whose work sits at the crossroads of ecology, cosmology, philosophy, and the humanities. Across episodes, the hosts explore how different ways of knowing—scientific inquiry, spiritual traditions, myth and folklore, literature, and embodied practice—shape our understanding of reality and our relationship to a living planet.
Many conversations focus on awe and wonder as human experiences that can be sparked by encounters with wilderness, deep time, the night sky, or the intricacy of biological systems. Guests often examine the limits of mechanistic explanations and consider viewpoints that treat consciousness, meaning, or the sacred as integral to nature rather than separate from it. Themes include mystical experience and transcendence, sometimes discussed through altered states and psychedelics, as well as long-standing religious and philosophical traditions such as Sufism, Buddhism, pantheism, and shamanic practices.
The show also connects wonder to contemporary pressures: the climate crisis, the attention economy, and political and economic systems that shape environmental outcomes. Several discussions consider ethical and practical responses, from conservation efforts that bridge science and faith communities to legal movements that argue for rights of nature. Alongside these urgent topics, the podcast returns repeatedly to storytelling—fairy tales, novels, cultural history, and ecological narrative—as a way to recover older forms of attention, cultivate moral imagination, and reframe what it means to belong to the more-than-human world.
