Internationally known, award-winning writer and editor Ilan Stavans sees an anthology as something akin to a library where the books come down from the shelves at night and fly around, mixing and mingling and enriching each other in a great time of sharing.

So it makes perfectly good sense that Stavans would mark the 250th birthday of his adopted country by editing a book of more than 100 works spanning four centuries—all connected by a shared theme: How Americans have grappled with God.

The anthology includes fiction, essays, political pieces, songs, poems, speeches, sermons, comic strips, and even a photograph of a TIME magazine cover. Together, they explore a country founded on the principle that its people were “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights; a country that, a little more than 200 years later, put “In God We Trust” on its money and “One Nation, Under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Yet America is also a country where record numbers of people identify as religiously unaffiliated, while roughly 90 percent still profess to believe in a higher power.

In this episode of Upstart Crow, Ilan Stavans talks with William Miller about the idea behind his anthology, the works he chose and why, and some of the nearly 100 pieces he removed from an early draft. They explore what Americans have done with the idea of God—and what that idea has done to the people of America.

About Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans has published more than 30 books and is well known for his investigations of language and culture, as well as his work in anthologies.

Born in Mexico in 1961 to a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, Stavans was raised in a multilingual environment. His autobiography, On Borrowed Words, appeared in 2001.

He is known for his research on English, Spanish, Yiddish, Ladino, and, in particular, Spanglish. In 2003, he published Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language, which includes a lexicon of approximately 6,000 terms and a Spanglish translation of the first chapter of Don Quixote. He subsequently completed a Spanglish translation of the entire novel by Miguel de Cervantes.

Stavans is the author of several award-winning short-story collections. The internationally released, award-winning feature film My Mexican Shivah, co-produced by John Sayles, was based on his story “Morirse está en hebreo.” His story The Disappearance, adapted for the stage by the experimental theater troupe DoubleEdge, has toured the world. His one-man show The Oven has been seen in cities across the United States.

Stavans is also the author of Resurrecting Hebrew, books on love and the Bible, Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion, Quixote: The Novel and the World, and a biography of Gabriel García Márquez's career through the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His lectures on Don Quixote and on visions of the divine across cultures are available from Recorded Books. Stavans is also editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliography: Latino Studies.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• America’s relationship with God is complicated. Ilan Stavans explores how Americans have questioned, negotiated, embraced, and sometimes weaponized religion throughout the country’s history.

• Religion can be both medicine and illness. It can provide morality, community, and structure while also becoming a source of division, violence, and destruction.

• Doubt is essential to being human. Stavans argues that questioning—not certainty—is at the heart of intelligence, belief, and personal growth.

• An anthology is a conversation across time. A Nation Wrestles with God brings together more than 100 voices and perspectives, allowing writers from vastly different eras and backgrounds to “speak” to one another.

• Literature gives us access to interior life. The conversation explores how writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Mark Twain reveal the complexity of what happens inside a character’s mind.

• Language matters. Stavans discusses the importance of allowing dialects, slang, Spanglish, Yiddish, and other forms of language to retain their complexity rather than being “streamlined.”

• America is shaped by perception. The discussion moves from Walter Lippmann and Rashomon to the question of whether there is a single reality—or simply the realities we perceive.

• Technology and AI may threaten our interior voices. Stavans worries that increasingly powerful technology could diminish the space we have for uncertainty, reflection, and internal dialogue.

• America’s religious identity is changing, but religion isn’t disappearing. Even as traditional religious participation declines, belief in some form of God remains widespread.

• Outsiders can help us understand ourselves. Stavans sees the immigrant and outsider perspective as a valuable way of challenging assumptions held by people immersed in their own culture.

“Doubt is the mother of intelligence. Doubt is the mother of belief.” - Ilan Stavans

Purchase a copy of the anthology, A Nation Wrestles with God, here.

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