Podcast: Stephen Kiesling, The Roots of American Spirituality

Stephen Kiesling is editor in chief of S+H. He was a Scholar of the House in philosophy at Yale and rowed on the 1980 Olympic Rowing Team. He has written for the New Yorker and Sports illustrated and is the author of books including The Shell Game and Walking the Plank. He lives at Ti’lomikh Falls in Oregon, where he discovered The Story Chair and helped restart the ancient Takelma Salmon Ceremony, which is a likely source of the “Right to Life” in The Declaration of Independence.

His March/April 2023 cover story “The Source of the Declaration of Independence” about the Indigenous roots of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be read here.

What happened here, and what happened in a lot of places was really horrible. But, to the extent that we can’t fix any of it, at least acknowledging it opens up so much…especially here in Oregon…nobody is arguing that it isn’t true. Nobody can say that it didn’t happen, and that’s important.

In this episode, Stephen and Rabbi Rami talk about Total Aliveness, our obligation to feed the hungry, and who gets to tell the story of America.

Read Rabbi Rami's thoughts on this discussion here.