Do you have a favorite? Not meant to, but mostly the unloved ones, the unvisited ones, the cases that get dusty and ignored.

All the broken and shunned creatures.

Someone's got to care for them.

Who shall it be if not us? Yes.

Yes. Welcome to Roon soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the very best new and old ideas for living in this world, coming to you from

43 degrees south on a small farm in deepest Tasmania.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

This week I am very pleased to welcome back to the show one of my favorite

guests from last year, Diana Welsh Persulka. Dr. Persulka is chair of the Department of Philosophy

and Religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

She returns today to talk about her latest book, American Cosmic.

Diana, welcome back.

Well, thank you for having me back.

This is great.

I enjoy talking with you.

Oh, absolutely.

The feeling is very mutual.

And last time we spoke, we spoke about the upcoming book

and a bunch of other stuff like you know Saints and and

Things Adventures in the Vatican and all this kind of stuff but the book is is out now and and obviously I've read it and really interesting I wasn't sure what

I was expecting but it's it's almost like a road novel or something yeah it is. And I mean, talk us through that to start with because it's like how do you tell a story like this when you actually can't tell all of it because of the nature of the actual content.

So was that, was it was a lot of thinking around, well, how do I tell this?

...