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About the Book

Spanning more than 400 years of spiritual transformation and imagination, A Nation Wrestles With God collects diverse writers—poets, novelists, theologians, scientists, musicians, politicians, comedians, artists, mavericks, naturalists, futurists, and more—whose daring texts incited change and continue to influence a growing nation. In this anthology, you will find the stories, poems, letters, speeches, sermons, essays, song lyrics, comic strips, newspaper columns, and commentaries that awoke new generations to free religious thought, from the pre-colonial to the present day.

Praise for A Nation Wrestles With God

“Whether we like it or not, as Americans, we must grapple with God. The struggle is part of our lineage and our legacy, and this extraordinary anthology shows us how.”

—Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness

“The theme of the chronological collection is the unique way in which North Americans—Indigenous and immigrants—conceived of God’s power over landscape. The American sublime—great mountains, rivers, valleys, and swaths of cultivated countryside—has always provoked us to ask if there is an intelligence behind it. . . . A wonderfully capacious anthology of writings about America’s unique relationship to religion.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Faith makes its own forms,” said Emerson, and this fascinating anthology shows just how many different forms it has brought forth in America. Christian and Jew, President and slave, witch-hunter and evolutionary biologist—all have their own ideas about God, and only in America could they speak to each other as freely as they do in these pages.”

—Adam Kirsch, author of The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the 20th Century

“OMG, by which I mean ‘Oh my gods!’ The one or many gods we praise or struggle with, the one or many gods we reject. They are all here in A Nation Wrestles with God, an anthology that offers us an opportunity to read excerpts from the work of a wide range of Americans who engage with concepts of the divine. If ever there were a time when it would be useful to consider the presence or absence of God in American life, this is it. Now, thanks to the brilliant work of Ilan Stavans, we can immerse ourselves in an anthology that just may help us see clearly how diverse, thoughtful, serious, and playful we are and have always been as a people, as a nation.”

—Richard Chess, Professor Emeritus, UNC Asheville, and author, most recently, of The Loneliest Monk

“The United States of America is often understood to be a passively-God-fearing nation—not an active, animated, God-grappling one. In A Nation Wrestles with God, Ilan Stavans passionately disproves this stereotype. Rather than rehashing academic and philosophical debates about elusive holiness, Stavans invites us to wrestle personally with the God-invoking words of diverse ‘heroes,’ ‘villains,’ and the many complicated Americans positioned between such moral extremes. He takes the reader on an exciting journey during which God is questioned, condemned, comically illustrated, rejected, adored, and agonized over by Americans of many faiths and backgrounds. A Nation Wrestles with God reveals God-grappling to be a strikingly common American pastime—suggesting that fraught, heated debates about the most sacred questions may actually bind the nation together.”

—Amy Reed-Sandoval, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“Americans have never agreed on God, and thank God for that. In this extraordinary anthology—part sacred history, part cultural excavation, part dare—Ilan Stavans traces the longest-running argument in the republic, from John Winthrop’s shining city to Allen Ginsberg’s howling Kaddish, from Frederick Douglass exposing slaveholder Christianity to Art Spiegelman drawing God into the death camps, from Joseph Smith’s golden plates to Philip K. Dick’s pink laser beam of divine information. A Nation Wrestles with God is fearless in its range and exhilarating in its juxtapositions: prophets beside comedians, enslaved poets beside sci-fi visionaries, the devout beside the defiant, all tangled in the same ancient, unresolvable question. Stavans reads the nation’s spiritual life through its language and reveals a tradition that is rancorous, polyphonic, and magnificent precisely because it refuses resolution. He writes in his luminous introduction that ‘even atheists wrestle with God.’ This book proves that the wrestling itself, fierce and unfinished, is America’s deepest act of faith. Just as the nation wrestles with God, Stavans reminds us, God wrestles right back.”

—Christopher González, Southern Methodist University

“What a collection! In A Nation Wrestles with God, Ilan Stavans shows us that grappling with morality—with questions of right and wrong, with ethical challenges, with the divine—might be America’s oldest and truest national pastime. Both religious believers and skeptics will see themselves and their concerns reflected in this volume, which spans this nation’s history. In this time of national divisiveness, Stavans shows us that even though Americans have never agreed on all the answers, our passion for asking the biggest questions has always connected us.”

—Susan McWilliams Barndt, Claremont McKenna College

“Stavans pulls off the impossible: a searing volume that holds America’s most restless and necessary argument with God, with itself, with the very meaning of nation. With polyphonic sagacity, he guides us through the full, fractious sweep of the republic’s spiritual life, from Navajo night chants and Puritan fire to Douglass’s thunderous abolitionism, Emerson’s transcendentalist rapture, Eisner’s comic-panel theology, and the post-secular wrestlings of Baldwin, Harjo, and Hitchens. Inveterate skeptic and devout believer at once, Stavans makes us feel, with new urgency, that America has never been more alive than in its refusal to stop arguing with God.”

—Frederick Luis Aldama, award-winning author and the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at UT Austin

“While many are turning away from religious faith, Ilan Stavans brings us a collection that renews the inspiring prophetic spirit of America. His collection lifts our hearts and brings us hope.”

—Susanna Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College

“A Nation Wrestles with God, the new anthology edited by Ilan Stavans, is a truly remarkable achievement. What Stavans has managed to accomplish is to find and put together texts written about God from an extraordinarily wide range of American voices across time and place. There are presidents and poets, theologians and novelists, famous men and women writing surprising things about God and people you might never have heard of, sharing their deepest convictions and doubts. The operative word here is “wrestles,” as we encounter statements of belief and unbelief, confidence and confusion. The American experience, the American experiment, is intertwined from the beginning with religion, and in this anthology—so appropriate to appear as we begin the celebration of 250 years since the founding of the nation—we get to see the great multiplicity of views about religion that is an abiding part of this country’s diversity and strength."

—Barry W. Holtz, Theodore and Florence Baumritter Professor of Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

About the Contributors

Ilan Stavans is the publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast.”

Book details

Paperback • $26
ISBN: 9781632064196
eBook ISBN: 9781632064202
Publication date: June 30, 2026
6" x 9" • 528 pages
Anthology: History / Religion / Philosophy
Rights: North America