Hearing God. Visits from the dead. Mystical experiences. Deathbed encounters. The paranormal.

For most of human history, experiences like these were taken seriously. Today, they are often dismissed, hidden, or simply never talked about.

In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal go straight into that uncomfortable territory: what happens when the unseen breaks into ordinary life, and how do you know what to do with it?

Jerry describes hearing God, encounters with departed loved ones, and the quiet divine nudges that can shape everyday decisions. Abigail shares why Jerry actually seemed more normal after he began hearing God - less driven by ego, more integrated, and more fully himself.

But spiritual experience has its dangers.

Visions, mystical encounters, and paranormal experiences can become something to chase. Spirituality can turn into status. The desire to feel chosen, enlightened, or closer to the divine can become its own form of ego.

Jerry and Abigail explore that tension through Joan of Arc, paranormal visitations, life after death, mystical experience, and the strange moments that resist easy explanation.

The point is not to hunt for extraordinary experiences. It is to stay open enough to notice what comes, grounded enough not to inflate it, and honest enough to ask what it might mean.

Hearing God, the Paranormal, and Spiritual Ego is a candid conversation about the unseen, the danger of spiritual hubris, and what it means to stay receptive to the divine without losing yourself along the way.

Listen to Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue wherever you get your podcasts.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

A Good Look at Evil

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Joan of Arc heard divine voices that changed the course of her life. Centuries later, writer Reynolds Price described his own encounter with Jesus during a devastating battle with cancer and chronic pain.

Jerry L. Martin places these experiences alongside his own unexpected experience of hearing God and considers what happens when extraordinary spiritual encounters do not fit our usual categories.

Why are people so reluctant to talk about mystical or spiritual experiences? What might be missed when they are dismissed simply because they do not fit within a modern scientific worldview?

Jerry draws on Joan of Arc, Reynolds Price, William James, Eric Voegelin, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet to make the case for taking reports of divine encounters seriously.

That does not mean accepting every spiritual claim without question. It means remaining open to the possibility that reality may contain more than our existing categories can explain.

This From God to Jerry to You reflection explores hearing God, mystical experience, divine encounters, spiritual philosophy, and the hidden experiences people rarely tell anyone about.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***

Continue the conversation with Ultimate Questions on calling, divine guidance, and how we recognize what is ours to do:

https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

***

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Why are we sometimes afraid of love, even when love is exactly what we want?

In this episode of What’s On Our Mind?, Scott Langdon and Jerry L. Martin explore one of the most personal questions Jesus asks Jerry in God: An Autobiography: “Why are you afraid of love?”

Jerry reflects on his unexpected encounter with Jesus, his resistance to letting love fully enter his heart, and the vulnerability that comes with allowing another person - or the divine - into our most intimate inner space. Scott connects Jerry’s experience with his own questions about trust, disappointment, control, and the fear that love may be withdrawn.

Their conversation moves from Jesus and God’s love to intimacy, human relationships, spiritual vulnerability, and the idea that “love is always the love of something incomplete.” What does love ask of us when we feel separate, wounded, unfinished, or afraid?

Scott and Jerry also discuss the heart as a spiritual symbol, the difference between separateness and connection, and how love may draw us toward healing, wholeness, and a deeper relationship with God and one another.

Listen for a thoughtful conversation about Jesus, fear of love, God’s love, vulnerability, intimacy, spiritual growth, and what it may really mean to let love in.

Related Episodes:

301. Special Episode: Finding God Beyond Religion- Spiritual Discernment in Everyday Life

300. Special Episode: Who Are We to God?

299. Jesus, Love, and the Reality of Evil | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

298. When You Feel Unworthy of Love: A Message from Jesus- From God to Jerry to You

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

A piece of music, a friendship, a moment in nature, a struggle with suffering, a quiet stretch of contemplation, or a remark made almost in passing can become a point of contact with something larger than ourselves.

In this special episode, Jerry L. Martin considers theology as an inquiry into divine or ultimate reality. Particles are ultimate in physics. Leibniz had his monads. Jerry is interested in the kind of ultimate reality that has, or ought to have, a gravitational pull on our lives.

Religious traditions offer rich glimpses of that reality, alongside philosophy, literature, depth psychology, art, music, love, friendship, suffering, and the demands that arise unexpectedly in the course of a life. A calling may be one of those moments. So may a clue, a nudge, or something said by a friend at exactly the right time.

Spiritual discernment means learning to notice those glimmers and take them seriously without losing the ability to question them. Jerry considers projection, fantasy, groupthink, and the assumptions we bring to our own experience, while also asking what can be missed when doubt becomes the starting point for everything.

His “epistemics of trust” offers another possibility: an open mind, an open heart, and a willingness to let experience teach us. No one can take in everything. The task is more personal than that: to recognize the breadcrumbs along your own path and follow them as faithfully as you can.

Jerry L. Martin is the founder of Theology Without Walls, a cooperative, constructive, trans-religious theological project devoted to understanding ultimate reality as fully as possible. Its premise is that revelation, enlightenment, and insight into the divine are not confined to a single tradition, so theology should be willing to learn from the insights found across religious traditions.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***

Continue the conversation with Ultimate Questions on calling, divine guidance, and how we recognize what is ours to do:

https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

***

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

For the 300th episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Scott Langdon returns to the first 44 episodes and asks three questions that reach to the heart of the entire series: Who are we to God? What are we to God? And why are we to God?

The episode begins with Jerry L. Martin’s unexpected relationship with God. A lifelong agnostic and philosopher, Jerry never set out looking for God, but after praying in gratitude, he received an answer in words. From there, his conversations with God opened into questions about divine presence, human responsibility, creation, and the purpose of our lives.

Looking back at key moments from the original dramatic adaptation, Scott explores what it means when God tells Jerry that He wants to be “co-present and a co-participant” in ordinary life. The relationship is not passive or one-sided. Human response matters, and God describes His own development as being connected to the development and choices of human beings.

That leads to the second question: What are we to God? In one of the clearest answers from the book, Jerry is told that “human effort completes creation.” Our actions, relationships, choices, acts of love, failures, forgiveness, and attempts to repair what has been broken all become part of something larger. We are participants in creation, not simply observers of it.

The final question is the largest of all: Why are we to God? As Jerry wrestles with the scale of existence, God tells him that there is “a meaning to the whole.” That meaning points toward completeness, connectedness, and the movement of the many back into the one.

Episode 300 is not simply a look back. It is a return to the questions that have shaped God: An Autobiography, The Podcast from the beginning and continue to guide its exploration of God, human purpose, spiritual experience, and our place in the larger story of creation.

Related Episodes:

10. I Learn How God Reveals Himself To Humans | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

18. God Explains Polytheism In A Way I Understand | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

27. I Learn Human Effort Completes Creation | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

39. Upset By God, I Stop Praying | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

40. God Explains Infinite Worlds And Their Purpose | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Jerry was driving home from work when Jesus appeared to him.

What he remembers most is the love. It was so direct and overwhelming that his first reaction was resistance.

In this episode of Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry and Abigail talk about that encounter, what it means to receive love, and why being loved can sometimes feel exposing.

Abigail brings a very different perspective to Jesus. As a Jewish philosopher, she has never understood Jesus as necessary to a relationship with God. She talks about the difference between the historical Jesus and the Christian doctrines that came later, including Original Sin and the idea of Jesus as an intermediary.

They also take on Freud, Darwin, human nature, and the kinds of theories people absorb so deeply that they can start to feel more real than experience itself.

Abigail returns to the subject of evil, something she explored in A Good Look at Evil. She argues that evil cannot always be explained away as deprivation, misunderstanding, or psychological dysfunction. Sometimes it has to be recognized plainly for what it is.

Nietzsche, skepticism, self-trust, and cultural fashion all come into the picture as Jerry and Abigail ask what helps us stay connected to reality instead of getting lost in theories about it.

Throughout the episode, love keeps coming back as something more demanding than a feeling. It means paying attention, using judgment, taking responsibility, and trying to do right by the people in front of you.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

A Good Look at Evil

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What happens when love is offered, but part of you still feels unworthy of receiving it?

In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin shares a deeply personal encounter with Jesus that challenged his resistance to love. Reflecting on childhood shame, fear of being seen, and the feeling that there are parts of ourselves that make us undeserving, Jerry recounts Jesus telling him to let down his defenses and accept a love that is “full, unreserved, unrelenting.”

Jerry explores why accepting love can sometimes be harder than giving it, how shame can shape the way we see ourselves, and what it might mean to believe that divine love does not depend on perfection. Rather than offering simple reassurance, the experience becomes a continuing challenge: to stop guarding against love and allow God’s love to reach the places we are most inclined to hide.

A moving reflection on Jesus, shame, self-worth, vulnerability, and learning to receive unconditional love.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***

Continue the conversation with Ultimate Questions on calling, divine guidance, and how we recognize what is ours to do:

https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

***

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Scott shares a story about his brother Lee, a simple text message, and a dream that made the timing feel almost impossible to ignore.

In this episode of What’s On Our Mind, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon talk about signs, coincidences, and divine guidance in everyday life. They reflect on the ways God may come to us through other people, intuition, prayer, art, and unexpected moments that seem to carry a meaning of their own.

Scott also talks about the anxiety that can come with trying too hard to figure out what God wants, while Jerry considers the importance of becoming quiet enough to listen and notice what is already in front of us.

Are some coincidences more than coincidence? And how do we know when a passing moment, a sudden nudge, or an unexpected connection might be pointing us toward something more?

Related Episodes:

296. What's Your Spiritual Story? The Search for Truth with Alex Woollends

295. God’s Reason for Being - Radically Personal Finale

294. Romantic Love, God’s Love, and What Makes Love Real | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

293. Feeling God’s Love Through Other People- From God to Jerry to You

288. You’re Not Alone: How God Speaks Through Other People- From God to Jerry to You

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What happens when the search for truth becomes a search for God?

In this episode of What’s Your Spiritual Story?, philosopher Alex Woollends joins Jerry L. Martin to share an intellectual and deeply personal journey shaped by conscience, philosophy, spiritual discernment, and the desire to become a better person.

Alex describes growing up around religious belief while struggling with explanations that did not satisfy his questions. His search led him through libertarianism, ethical intuitionism, philosophical idealism, and the work of thinkers including Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, George Berkeley, Plato, Carl Jung, Michael Huemer, Gene Callahan, and J. Budziszewski.

Along the way, Alex began to see conscience not merely as a feeling, but as a genuine source of moral knowledge. He came to question ideology itself, explore the spiritual nature of reality, and consider whether truth must ultimately be discovered through lived experience.

That journey eventually brought him to God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. In its account of divine reality, interconnectedness, transformation, and human participation in God’s ongoing action, Alex encountered ideas that closely reflected the path he had already been following.

Together, Jerry and Alex explore the relationship between philosophy and religion, the meaning of conscience, the limits of ideology, the nature of ultimate mind, the significance of Jesus, and the possibility that becoming a better person can help make the world itself better.

This is a thoughtful conversation for anyone searching for truth, wrestling with belief, questioning inherited religion, or wondering how philosophy can become a lived spiritual path.

Join the conversation on the Ultimate Questions Substack: Does each of us have a personal calling that responds to something beyond ourselves?

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Why does God seem hidden if God wants to be known?

In the ninth and final episode of Radically Personal, philosopher Jerry L. Martin concludes his exploration of what it means for God to know each person individually and invite us into a relationship that can transform how we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world.

Jerry examines the many ways God may communicate—not only through prayer, but through dreams, intuition, conscience, beauty, love, mystical experience, and quiet promptings that can feel like our own thoughts. He asks what kind of response God seeks and considers what it means to live in alignment with the divine rather than simply follow commands.

The episode then turns to the meaning of human life. Each life may be a unique test, exploration, and sacred improvisation in which our choices, failures, suffering, love, and growth genuinely matter. God is not presented as a distant observer, but as a partner who shares in every individual triumph and setback.

The series ends with its most extraordinary idea: our transformation may be God’s very reason for being.

Explore the full Radically Personal Series and Book

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

*********

We continue these spiritual and philosophical conversations through Ultimate Questions, a public discussion project of Theology Without Walls on Substack.

Join the conversation and share your perspective on life’s deepest questions:
 https://ultimatequestions.substack.com

*********

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What makes romantic love feel more powerful than reason, safer choices, or even self-preservation? And what does it mean to experience God’s love through the person who loves you?

In this intimate dialogue, Jerry and Abigail return to God’s striking instruction: “Let Abigail love you. You will feel My love through her.” Jerry reflects on why God’s love might need to become tangible through another person, while Abigail considers what it means to embody that love through presence, touch, sacrifice, and a shared life.

Abigail reflects on falling in love as an overwhelming force that resisted every attempt to explain or contain it. Not psychology. Not philosophy. Not even Husserl’s phenomenology could give her enough distance from the pull of erotic and romantic love.

Their conversation moves through desire, sacrifice, feminism, sexuality, and the difference between casual sex and a love that asks something deeper of us. Abigail recalls leaving behind an ideal life in New York, not in search of comfort or happiness, but because love itself carried an authority she could not ignore.

From the Garden of Eden to Dante, Jane Austen, the Brontës, D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway, and Dickens, Jerry and Abigail ask what modern culture may have lost when sex became detached from romance, courtship, nobility, and risk.

Can erotic love still awaken courage, devotion, and sacrifice? And can the love between two people reveal something of God that cannot be felt any other way?

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

A Good Look at Evil

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What does it mean to feel God’s love through another person?

In this episode of From God to Jerry to You, Jerry L. Martin reflects on an early moment in his relationship with God, when he was asked to “enter My heart.” 

The request frightened him, and when he asked for help, God answered: “Let Abigail love you. Feel My love through her.”

That experience leads Jerry to explore how divine love becomes real through romantic love, family love, friendship, intimacy, tenderness, and human connection. Jerry considers the transcendent quality of love, the presence of God within our closest relationships, and the possibility that loving others is one of the deepest ways we become partners with God.

Listen for a thoughtful reflection on God’s love, spiritual intimacy, and the sacred power of loving and being loved.

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***

Continue the conversation with Ultimate Questions on calling, divine guidance, and how we recognize what is ours to do:

https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

***

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Is God a person, and what does it mean to experience God through relationships, grief, and everyday life? 

In this episode of What's On Our Mind, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon explore the personal and interpersonal nature of God and consider how divine presence may appear through the people who love, guide, challenge, and remember us.

Scott reflects on the death of his close friend Vince and shares how he encountered God not by escaping grief, but by remaining present to love, memory, work, and the life directly in front of him.

Together, Jerry and Scott discuss finding God during suffering, recognizing meaning in difficult experiences, and learning to “play the scene you are in” rather than becoming trapped in what should have happened.

This moving conversation explores grief and spirituality, living in the present moment, personal calling, and the ways ordinary encounters can become expressions of divine love.

What changes when we begin treating every person not as a role or function, but as a person whose story is also being shaped by God?

Related Episodes:

291. What's Your Spiritual Story? John Thatamanil on Faith, Preaching, and Spiritual Formation

290. The Right Track: Finding God Beyond Sin and Suffering- Radically Personal

289. The Difference Between Coincidence and God | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

288. You’re Not Alone: How God Speaks Through Other People- From God to Jerry to You

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What shapes a person's spiritual story? Can childhood experiences, faith, and the practice of preaching become the foundation for a lifetime of spiritual transformation?

In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, philosopher Jerry L. Martin welcomes theologian and Episcopal priest John Thatamanil for a deeply personal conversation about the experiences that shaped his faith and vocation. From his childhood in India's ancient Mar Thoma Christian tradition to immigrating to the United States, John reflects on the moments that led him toward theology, ordination, and a life devoted to preaching.

Together, Jerry and John explore the surprising ways our earliest experiences influence our understanding of God. Their conversation moves through prayer, trauma, memory, spiritual formation, religious experience, and the search for truth, revealing how a life of faith is formed not only by belief, but by the people, traditions, and encounters that transform us over time.

Drawing from Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, John shares how multiple religious traditions have deepened rather than diminished his understanding of the divine. Along the way, he discusses nonduality, contemplative practice, and the role of preaching as a path of both personal and communal transformation.

Whether you are exploring your own spiritual journey, interested in comparative theology, or simply asking deeper questions about faith, this conversation offers a thoughtful and deeply human reflection on what it means to seek God across a lifetime.

Join the conversation on the Ultimate Questions Substack: Does each of us have a personal calling that responds to something beyond ourselves?

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What if the goal of spiritual life is not to merge with God?

What if sin is not a debt to be paid, but a condition to be healed? And what if suffering is not an accident of existence, but part of what makes love, freedom, and relationship possible?

In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry Martin explores some of the most surprising insights from his dialogues with God. He reflects on what it means for God to be a person, why every individual may have a unique path to the divine, and why spiritual growth is less about escaping the world than learning to live in harmony with it.

Along the way, Jerry examines the nature of prayer, the meaning of personal relationship with God, the role of friction and struggle in human development, and a radically different understanding of sin, forgiveness, and spiritual transformation.

Perhaps most importantly, he considers what it means to get on "the right track"—the path God has in mind for each of us—and why that path may already be closer than we think.

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

*********

We continue these spiritual and philosophical conversations through Ultimate Questions, a public discussion project of Theology Without Walls on Substack.

Join the conversation and share your perspective on life’s deepest questions:
 https://ultimatequestions.substack.com

*********

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

How do we know when something is merely a coincidence—and when it may be something more?

In this episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry Martin and Abigail Rosenthal explore spiritual discernment, divine guidance, and the challenge of recognizing meaning in ordinary life. From Sherlock Holmes and the art of observation to unexpected events that seemed to reveal a deeper pattern, they ask how we distinguish chance from providence and whether God may be present in experiences we are tempted to overlook.

The conversation includes two remarkable personal stories from Abigail's life: one involving an unexpected turn of events that transformed her academic career, and another involving what she describes as the clearest experience of divine communication she has ever received.

How do we test spiritual experiences? What does it mean to hear God's voice? And how can we remain open to the possibility that our lives may be part of a larger story?

Listen to the full episode and join the conversation.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What if God is speaking, but not in the way you expected?

In this episode, Jerry L. Martin reflects on how God may guide us through everyday life, through prayer, intuition, conscience, spiritual experience, and through other people.

When Jerry first heard God ask him to “tell My story,” he was surprised by the idea that God could have a story at all. But as he was led through the sacred texts of the world’s religions, he began to see divine reality as active, personal, many-sided, and deeply involved in human life.

God’s story is not only found in ancient scriptures or world religions. It continues in the lives of ordinary people.

Jerry explores how to recognize divine guidance, how to listen for God’s presence, and why spiritual discernment begins with paying attention. 

Sometimes God may speak through a friend’s advice, a repeated message, a task that falls into your path, a feeling in the body, or a moment of unexpected help.

For anyone who has ever felt abandoned by God, spiritually alone, or unsure how to hear God’s voice, this episode offers a powerful reminder: you may not be alone. God may already be present through the people, signs, and quiet invitations around you.

This From God to Jerry to You reflection explores divine signs, spiritual calling, religious experience, suffering, gratitude, and how God speaks through other people.

***

Continue the conversation with Ultimate Questions on calling, divine guidance, and how we recognize what is ours to do:

https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

***

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What is the spiritual meaning of suffering, and why is suffering such a real part of human life? 

In this What’s On Our Mind conversation, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon explore suffering, grief, compassion, spiritual growth, and the ways reality discloses itself personally to each of us.

Drawing from God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Axial Age, this episode reflects on suffering not as a meaningless accident, but as part of the real terrain of life. Jerry and Scott discuss why pain can become information, why grief can reveal love and meaning, and how different spiritual traditions can help us respond to suffering with humility, discernment, and compassion.

The conversation also considers God’s presence in human suffering, the role of personal spiritual experience, and the question of how each person is called to respond to reality as it unfolds. 

For anyone seeking meaning in grief, pain, loss, or spiritual struggle, this episode offers a thoughtful reflection on suffering, healing, and the search for divine presence in a real and difficult world.

Related Episodes:

283. Why Suffering Is the Law of Growth: What to Accept, What to Change- From God to Jerry to You

284. Suffering, Purpose, and the Courage to Keep Living Fully | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

285. A New Axial Age? Religion and Spiritual Transformation- Radically Personal

286. What's Your Spiritual Story?: Dr Stephen Spector on the Bible as Literature and the Nature of God

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

***Ultimate Questions***

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this deeply personal installment of What’s Your Spiritual Story, Jerry L. Martin speaks with Dr. Stephen Spector, professor of English, scholar of religion and literature, and author, for a profound conversation about spiritual experience, suffering, miracles, the Bible, and the changing nature of God.

Spector recounts the moment that transformed his life forever. At fifteen years old, after his mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only weeks to live, he made a bargain with God. What followed would shape his spiritual life, his understanding of faith, and his lifelong relationship with scripture.

Drawing from his background in medieval literature, biblical interpretation, psychology, and Jewish thought, Dr. Spector explores the Bible not only as sacred text, but as a living literary and psychological journey. Together, he and Jerry discuss Genesis, trauma, forgiveness, Jewish identity, evangelical support for Israel, Jewish-Christian dialogue, Ethiopian Jews, Isaac’s suffering, the problem of evil, and the surprising idea that God may grow and change through relationship with humanity.

This episode is thoughtful, intellectually rich, emotionally honest, and deeply human — ideal for listeners interested in spirituality, theology, religion, philosophy, biblical interpretation, spiritual transformation, and the search for meaning.

What does it mean to wrestle with God? Can suffering transform us? And what happens when we begin reading scripture not as distant history, but as a living story about becoming human?

Join the conversation on the Ultimate Questions Substack: Does each of us have a personal calling that responds to something beyond ourselves?

Get the books:

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Jerry L. Martin explores the idea that humanity may be entering a New Axial Age: a new era of spiritual transformation shaped by globalization, interreligious encounter, and expanding spiritual consciousness.

Drawing from philosopher Karl Jaspers, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Robert Bellah, and Theology Without Walls, he reflects on whether the world’s religions represent competing systems of belief or different dimensions of divine revelation.

Beginning with the remarkable story of Saint Josaphat — a Christian saint whose story traces back to the Buddha — this episode explores “religion in the singular,” mystical experience, comparative religion, and the possibility that spiritual truth has always moved dynamically across cultures and traditions.

What happens when inherited religious boundaries begin to loosen? Could humanity be moving toward a more open and interconnected understanding of spiritual reality?

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

*********

We continue these spiritual and philosophical conversations through Ultimate Questions, a public discussion project of Theology Without Walls on Substack.

Join the conversation and share your perspective on life’s deepest questions:
 https://ultimatequestions.substack.com

*********

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What happens when suffering enters a new season of life? How do we face aging, grief, limitation, and uncertainty without surrendering our sense of purpose?

In the latest Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, the married philosophers return for another stimulating dialogue exploring suffering, aging, calling, and the search for meaning. 

Beginning with the Serenity Prayer and the Stoic distinction between what we can and cannot control, the conversation moves into deeper questions about suffering as a source of growth, the temptation to “give up” too early in life, and the challenge of remaining fully engaged with one’s purpose.

Abigail reflects on resisting cultural narratives of decline, particularly those imposed on women, while sharing her thoughts on aging, neuropathy, resilience, and refusing to “die before you’re dead.” Jerry connects these reflections to themes from God: An Autobiography, including the idea that “suffering is the law of growth in the universe.”

The discussion also explores antisemitism, historical responsibility, Aristotle’s vision of human flourishing, the story of David and Goliath, and the question of what it means to live in alignment with one’s deepest calling.

This is a rich and personal conversation about suffering, purpose, spiritual courage, and remaining fully alive on the timeline of human history.

Whether you are navigating grief, searching for meaning, or trying to discern what still has your name on it, Episode 284 offers a thoughtful and deeply human exploration of the courage required to keep living fully. 

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In Episode 283 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin reflects on a striking idea given in prayer: “Suffering is the law of growth in the universe.” Through personal experience and philosophical insight, he explores what this means in everyday life in this From God to Jerry to You.

Drawing on Stoic Philosophy and the Serenity Prayer, this episode asks a central question: how do we know what to accept, and what we are called to change?

From aging and illness to habits and difficult decisions, discernment becomes essential. Not all suffering can be avoided—but it can be understood, and sometimes transformed.

The episode also turns to love. When life changes, when abilities fade, what does it mean to love someone for who they are, not what they do?

This is a reflection on suffering, growth, and the wisdom to live through both.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In Episode 282, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon explore moral ambiguity and how we make decisions when the right answer isn’t clear. 

What replaces fixed rules in a complex world? The conversation also turns to at-homeness, whether it’s something we seek or something we already are, connecting action, faith, and calling. 

Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Related Episodes:

281. What's Your Spiritual Story?: Hans on Spiritual but Not Religious & Religious Seeking

280. What Has Your Name on It? Calling, Truth, and Discernment- Radically Personal

279. Can You Ever Do the Right Thing? Moral Ambiguity | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

278. The Cost of Doing What’s Right: Moral Ambiguity in Real Life- From God to Jerry to You

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious, and can that way of life be taken seriously, both intellectually and spiritually?

In this episode, Hans le Grand shares his journey from physicist to theologian, and the question that shaped his work: what do religious seekers actually have in common? 

Drawing on his book Life Seeking Understanding, Hans explores the idea of a “theology of religious seeking”—a way of thinking about spirituality that moves beyond traditional religious boundaries while still engaging the deepest questions of meaning, truth, and growth.

This conversation touches on liberal theology, Unitarian Universalism, and the challenge of constructing a spiritual framework in a world where millions identify as spiritual but not religious.

If you’ve ever felt caught between belief and exploration, this episode offers a thoughtful and compelling path forward.

Join the conversation on Ultimate Questions: What does it mean to seek without a fixed framework?

Get the books:

Life Seeking Understanding: How Spiritual but Not Religious and Other Seekers Can Construct Their Own Theology

Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What if the most important decisions in your life don’t feel like choices at all?

In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry L. Martin explores calling not as something we choose, but something we recognize—something that can feel required—even when it is unclear or difficult.

Beginning with an epistemology of trust, he challenges the idea that knowledge starts with doubt. We rely on our experience from the start—but when it comes to calling, that raises a harder question: how do we know which inner promptings to trust?

Not every voice carries authority. And yet, the responsibility to discern cannot be handed off to anyone else.

Drawing on the idea of dharma in the Bhagavad Gita, the episode turns to a more specific question: what is being asked of you—here, now, in the life you are actually living?

At the center is a question that resists abstraction: what task has your name on it?

One way to approach this question is through three others: what are you being called to do, who or what is doing the calling, and who is the one being called?

Each answer carries its own kind of authority—and its own risk of misreading. The challenge is not only to listen, but to discern.

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What if doing the “right thing” isn’t always right?

In this episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, a deceptively simple question opens into one of the most difficult problems in moral philosophy: moral ambiguity. 

Can we ever act with complete moral certainty, or is every meaningful choice marked by tension, compromise, and consequence?

Drawing from God: An Autobiography and real-world experience, Jerry lays out three common ways people try to escape this burden: rigid moral rules, the pursuit of moral purity, and the attempt to rise “beyond good and evil.” 

Together, Jerry and Abigail examine why each approach ultimately fails, and what it means to live honestly within the complexity of real life.

Through powerful examples, from the story of Krishna and the Mahabharata to whistleblowers, personal relationships, and philosophical debates from Kant to Aristotle, this conversation moves beyond abstract ethics into lived decision-making. 

When truth causes harm, when lies may protect, and when action always carries a cost, how do we choose? This episode challenges the idea that morality is about staying pure or being right. Instead, it asks whether the real task is something harder: learning to navigate ambiguity with discernment, responsibility, and courage.

If you’ve ever struggled with a decision that had no clear answer, listen to this conversation; it will stay with you!

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What do you do when doing the right thing still carries a cost?

In this From God to Jerry to You episode, Jerry explores moral ambiguity through real situations where decisions cannot be separated from their consequences.

Opening with the reality of war and targeted killing, Jerry reflects on the removal of a dangerous leader and the question it raises: can an action be necessary and still carry moral weight?

Even when harm is prevented, lives are lost—including those not directly involved. Jerry turns to a central insight from his encounter with God: What is morally imperfect may still be morally required.

Drawing on the Bhagavad Gita, where duty, loyalty, and justice collide in a moment that demands action, Jerry considers whether the conflict can be avoided. The decision still has to be made.

He brings the discussion into everyday life—workplace decisions, institutional roles, and situations where telling the truth, protecting others, and doing what’s required do not align.

In ethics, this is often called the “dirty hands” problem: actions that may be justified yet carry a lasting moral cost. One point remains clear: decisions carry forward. Responsibility does not end once the choice is made.

This timely episode explores moral ambiguity, ethical decision-making, and the reality of living with the consequences of your actions. Listen and share your thoughts.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin explore what it means to trust your spiritual senses and practice discernment in everyday life. How do we recognize genuine spiritual guidance—and how do we test it?

Drawing on God: An Autobiography and Radically Personal, this conversation examines intuition, experience, and reflection in navigating calling, purpose, and trust. Jerry introduces an “epistemics of trust,” where experience becomes the starting point of knowledge—but must be carefully discerned.

Guidance may come through inner awareness, other people, or lived experience. Learning to quiet the mind, listen deeply, and evaluate what we receive is central to spiritual growth.

Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions

Related Episodes:

275. Spiritual Discernment and Religious Experience- Radically Personal

274. God as a Player in Your Life Story: Trusting Your Inner Call with Discernment | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue

273. Trusting Your Spiritual Senses and Finding Your Calling- From God to Jerry to You

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

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In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin speaks with philosopher and world religions scholar Jonathan Weidenbaum in the series “What’s Your Spiritual Story.”

Jonathan shares how his early fascination with Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Eastern philosophy led to a lifelong exploration of world religions. Through study, travel, and teaching, he immersed himself in diverse spiritual traditions across Asia while engaging deeply with thinkers like Martin Buber and Søren Kierkegaard.

Yet his path was not one of leaving Judaism behind—but of returning. Jonathan reflects on rediscovering Jewish practice through attending shul, putting on tefillin, and reconnecting with the rhythms and disciplines of religious life. His story highlights the tension between exploration and rootedness, and the way a tradition can call someone back over time.

The conversation explores spirituality, philosophy, prayer, and the challenge of understanding the divine—whether as a personal God or an ultimate reality. It also reflects on how religious identity can be reshaped in response to both personal searching and the pressures of the modern world.

Jonathan, Jerry, and others continue this conversation at Ultimate Questions, a public Substack from Theology Without Walls exploring life’s deepest questions across traditions. Join the discussion at substack.com/@ultimatequestions.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

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What if spiritual experiences are real — but deeply personal?

In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, philosopher Jerry L. Martin explores one of the most difficult questions in religion: how do we discern whether a spiritual experience is genuine?

Drawing on William James and the long philosophical tradition of spiritual discernment, Jerry examines why religious experience varies from person to person.

Different temperaments, histories, and cultures shape how individuals encounter ultimate reality. But if spiritual experiences differ so widely, how can they be evaluated?

Can one religion judge another? Is there a neutral standpoint from which competing belief systems can be assessed?

Jerry explores the philosophical challenge of spiritual discernment beyond the boundaries of any single tradition. Along the way he discusses thinkers such as Ignatius of Loyola, Jonathan Edwards, and William James.

The episode also introduces the idea of the “clarified soul,” the cultivated inner capacity that allows us to perceive spiritual truth with greater clarity and depth.

In a world of many religions and worldviews, the question remains: how do we responsibly seek what is ultimately true?

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

How do you know when an inner prompting is truly guidance — and when it is illusion? 

In this intimate dialogue, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore the challenge of spiritual discernment: learning to trust your spiritual senses without abandoning realism, reason, or common sense. 

What does it mean to follow an inner call responsibly? How do you test intuition against experience, wisdom, and the counsel of others?

Drawing from lived experience — including Jerry’s hearing of the “God voice,” their shared leap into marriage, and Abigail’s reflections in A Good Look at Evil and Confessions of a Young Philosopher — they consider how faith and practical wisdom must work together. 

Faith is not unrealism. It is not a shortcut. Nor is it blind emotion. Instead, it is a disciplined attentiveness to the deeper currents of your life, guided by both sincerity and discernment.

The conversation widens into a larger question: What story are you living? And what is your ideal story? 

Abigail reflects on the idea that God is not a distant abstraction but a Player — with a capital P — in the unfolding drama of your life. To live spiritually is not to withdraw from reality but to engage it more fully, with courage, humility, and intellectual honesty.

If you have ever wondered how to distinguish true guidance from impulse, how to balance faith and reason, or how to bring your actual life closer to your ideal life, this episode offers a thoughtful and grounded exploration of divine guidance, inner calling, and life as a story.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, A Good Look at Evil

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The newest From God to Jerry to You is a reflection on divine guidance, spiritual discernment, and the discovery of your calling. Jerry L. Martin shares prayer encounters from the podcast's early days and from more recent experiences. 

These moments reveal what it means to trust your spiritual senses, and how to recognize when guidance may be coming from beyond yourself.

What does it mean to discern God’s voice? How do we know when an inner prompting is truly divine?

Drawing from Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, Jerry explores an “epistemics of trust”—a philosophical framework for understanding how we know what we know. Just as we trust perception, memory, and reason, we may also learn to trust spiritual intuition.

This radically personal center is not arbitrary. It is, Jerry suggests, the instrument of revelation.

The episode also traces the vision behind Theology Without Walls and the birth of the Ultimate Questions Substack—a public forum inviting reflection on life’s deepest questions.

At the heart of this conversation is a simple but profound question: What does a calling feel like?

If you’ve ever wondered how to discern divine guidance, respond to the inner voice, or understand where faith and philosophy meet, this episode offers both depth and clarity. Listen now—and consider where you might be called.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

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In Episode 272 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry Martin and Scott Langdon ask a deceptively simple question: What is experience?

Is it just a stream of sensations passing through us — or is it the unfolding of meaning across a lifetime? When we look back at our lives, do we merely remember events, or do we discover layers of significance we couldn’t see before?

Drawing from Scott’s recent What’s Your Spiritual Story episode and Jerry’s Radically Personal series, the conversation turns to the radical uniqueness of every human life. No one has ever been duplicated. Every consciousness is singular. What might it mean, then, to say: “You are the experience God is having”?

Through reflections on theater, personal memory, Jane Austen’s Emma, the play Proof, and the philosophical idea of “thisness” (haecceitas), Jerry and Scott explore whether awareness itself is the meeting point between the human and the divine.

Experience changes us. Meaning deepens. And perhaps consciousness is not merely personal — but participatory in something far greater.

As you listen, consider your own experience. Where has meaning deepened for you? And what might it reveal about the divine presence within your life?

Related Episodes:

270. Recovering the Depth of Experience in a Flattened World- Radically Personal

271. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Scott’s Journey from Certainty to Love

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In Episode 271 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, host Scott Langdon shares his personal spiritual journey — from Lutheran liturgy and evangelical certainty to faith deconstruction, mental health challenges, and a renewed understanding of God as love.

Raised in the church and later immersed in evangelical Christianity, Scott’s faith was shaped by music, scripture, and sacred ritual. But a pivotal moment — being baptized again and feeling nothing — marked the beginning of a profound spiritual transformation. Through theater, bipolar diagnosis, marriage, loss, and deep questioning, Scott’s understanding of God shifted from external authority to lived experience.

What happens when you “give up God” and begin praying to love instead? Can faith survive doubt, silence, and reinvention?

God: An Autobiography, The Podcast explores spiritual experience through personal stories, philosophical reflection, and dramatic readings from the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. Each episode invites listeners to consider their own spiritual story and the possibility that divine encounter is rooted in lived experience.

If you’ve wrestled with belief, deconstruction, or the meaning of love and faith — this episode is for you.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godanautobiography.com
• Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What do we mean when we speak of human experience?

In this fourth installment of the Radically Personal series, Jerry Martin takes up that question and follows it carefully. Modern philosophy and science often frame experience in terms of sensations, data, or brain activity. Yet the way we actually live and perceive suggests something more expansive.

Drawing on William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hilary Putnam, Martin Buber, Edith Stein, and others, Jerry reflects on how we encounter the world in practice. He considers perception and embodiment, the depth present in persons and things, the pull of beauty and awe, and the way empathy makes another’s inner life accessible.

The discussion gradually turns toward love and value, tracing how worth emerges within experience itself. As the episode moves from perception to relationship to meaning, a picture comes into view: depth is not added from outside but belongs to experience as lived.

Join Jerry in taking experience seriously; it may open new ways of thinking about meaning, reality, and the possibility of the divine.

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected: questions@godanautobiography.com

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Can multiple religions be true at the same time? Married philosophers, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal, explore one of the most challenging questions about God and ultimate reality.

They reflect on the idea that different cultures are given different spiritual tasks. The Hebrew focus on history and covenant stands alongside India’s inward contemplative traditions, showing that divine truth unfolds in different ways across civilizations.

Jerry explains that Theology Without Walls must take lived spiritual experience seriously. Personal transformation, moments of divine connection, and the individual spiritual journey are essential data for understanding spiritual reality.

Abigail recalls her intense yoga practice of suspended breath and reflects on what that path taught her. She also shares a vivid memory involving Thomas Altizer, the theologian associated with the “God is dead” movement and explores the difference between politeness and real engagement with ultimate questions. 

We are living at the beginning of a New Axial Age, a time when the world’s religions now meet directly. 

The conversation is candid, thoughtful, and deeply personal, like listening in on two married philosophers as they connect lifelong spiritual experience with some of the biggest questions of our time. 

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected: questions@godanautobiography.com

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Can God speak through more than one religion?

In this episode of From God to Jerry to You, philosopher Jerry L. Martin explores a central insight from God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher: that divine wisdom may be working through many religious traditions across history, not just one.

Drawing from his recorded conversations with God, Jerry reflects on the idea that different religions may carry distinct spiritual assignments for different cultures and times. Rather than competing versions of truth, these paths may represent a spiritual “division of labor,” each revealing something essential about the divine.

This vision leads to what Jerry calls Theology Without Walls — an approach to faith that remains open to truth wherever it appears, including in other religions, philosophy, literature, science, and lived experience.

He also introduces the idea of a “New Axial Age,” a turning point in spiritual history in which seekers begin drawing wisdom from multiple traditions while deepening their personal relationship with God.

Whether you belong to a particular faith, identify as spiritual but not religious, or are simply curious about how divine guidance might move through different cultures, this episode offers an expansive and hopeful view of humanity’s shared spiritual journey.

Listen, reflect, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
• Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon reflect on what it means to live in partnership with God in a world where evil persists and meaning is still unfolding.

Drawing on biblical scholar John D. Levinson, they explore order and chaos, the idea of a developing God, and how discernment shows up in lived experience.

Referencing William James, the conversation turns to faith as embodied wisdom rather than rule-following, and to Jesus as an unfiltered expression of divine presence.

Through reflections on ego, power, tough love, and the teaching “knock and you will find,” the episode contrasts horizontal and vertical ways of seeing reality, suggesting that seeking itself may already place us within the Kingdom of God.

Related Episodes:

263. From God to Jerry to You- The Problem of Evil and the Kingdom of God

264. Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue- Evil, Love, and God

265. Radically Personal – William James on Religious Experience

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godandautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this special edition of What’s Your Spiritual Story?, philosopher Abigail Rosenthal sits down with her husband, Jerry L. Martin, for the most extended and personal telling of her spiritual story to date.

Drawing on her memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail traces the formation of her inner life from an Edenic childhood and early encounters with loss, to adolescent philosophical crisis, homesickness, and the search for a reality that could withstand time, absence, and illusion.

Along the way, she reflects on formative influences, including Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels, Homer’s Odyssey, Gandhi, existentialism, political idealism, and the dangers of moral absolutism and ideological guilt.

This conversation explores themes of time and impermanence, spiritual longing, innocence and disillusionment, femininity and intellectual life, and what it means to test ideas by living them.

Abigail recounts her experiences in Paris, London, and the American academy, examining how philosophy, spirituality, and personal history intersect—and sometimes collide—in a woman’s life.

Rather than offering tidy conclusions, this episode presents a lived spiritual journey: one shaped by curiosity, risk, error, and hard-won clarity. It is a story about becoming—not only a philosopher, but a person capable of resisting illusion while remaining open to meaning.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godandautobiography.com
• 📖 Get the God: Book
• 📖 Get Confessions of a Young Philosopher

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In this episode of Radically Personal, Jerry L. Martin turns to the work of American philosopher and psychologist William James to explore how divine reality is encountered in lived experience. Drawing from The Varieties of Religious Experience, Jerry reflects on James’s influence on the philosophy of religion and his claim that religion begins not with doctrines or institutions, but with personal experience—with what happens in the depths of a human life.

This conversation examines how experience functions as a window onto reality, why feelings and intuitions matter for discernment, and how religious and spiritual experience may reveal divine presence not as an object we perceive, but as a reality we participate in. Jerry explores prayer as relationship, the limits of abstract theory, and the importance of remaining open to fleeting, partial, and even unsystematic glimpses of meaning.

Radically Personal invites listeners into a seeker-centered approach to spirituality—one that trusts experience, honors personal vocation, and explores how God may still speak within the drama of everyday life.

_______________

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal – Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

_______________

Stay Connected

Share your thoughts or questions:

•  questions@godandautobiography.com

Get the books: 

•  Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age 
• God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this year-end intimate dialogue, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal return to one of the most enduring questions in philosophy and theology: why evil persists, and what that persistence reveals about God.

 Drawing on Jerry’s prayer experiences and Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil, the conversation explores the idea of an evolving God—not as a denial of divinity, but as a way of understanding divine struggle, incompleteness, and ongoing relationship with the world.

Moving through Jewish thought, rabbinic midrash, and biblical interpretation, Jerry and Abigail consider divine ambivalence and the intimacy implied in speaking to God as a family member rather than a distant abstraction. 

Abigail reflects on her own philosophical autobiography, "Confessions of a Young Philosopher," while Jerry situates God and Autobiography within a broader narrative of God’s interaction with cultures, histories, and individual lives.

The dialogue turns to skepticism and epistemology, questioning whether modern habits of doubt genuinely reflect how human beings know and live. Against intellectual posturing, the episode argues for sincerity, trust in experience, and the moral seriousness of truth-seeking. Love, in particular, emerges not as a distraction from philosophy but as a decisive mode of knowing—one that reshapes memory, reframes the past, and opens new ways of understanding both God and the self.

This conversation closes the year by inviting listeners into a deeper form of spiritual inquiry—one grounded in history, relationship, and lived truth rather than abstract certainty.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
• Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In Episode 263 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, philosopher Jerry L. Martin reflects on one of the most enduring and difficult questions in philosophy and theology: the problem of evil.

In this From God to Jerry to You episode, Jerry describes a pivotal moment near the end of his spiritual journey, when what he calls the “impossible puzzle” finally came together. Drawing on John D. Levinson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil, Jerry explains how God affirmed a radical insight—that the world, and even God’s presence within it, can be understood as incomplete and still unfolding.

The episode introduces two complementary ways of seeing reality: a horizontal perspective, in which struggle, disorder, and moral effort unfold over time, and a vertical perspective, in which ultimate meaning, goodness, and victory are already present. Through this lens, human action—acts of obedience, love, and partnership with God—becomes essential to the healing and completion of the world.

Jerry also reflects on the Kingdom of God, not as a distant future event, but as a living reality made present through love. Seen in this light, Jesus is not merely a historical figure, but a cosmic presence—one who embodies God’s full presence in the world and serves as a conduit to the Kingdom of God.

This episode offers a thoughtful, non-reductionist approach to suffering, meaning, and faith, and will resonate with listeners wrestling with the limits of purely material explanations of reality.

Listen, reflect, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
• Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Subscribe and listen free wherever you get podcasts

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this episode of What’s On Our Mind, Scott Langdon and Jerry L. Martin explore truth-seeking beyond reductionism. Drawing on Radically Personal, lived experience, acting, spiritual stories, and prayer, they ask how we know what’s real—and why meaning cannot be reduced to just chemistry. 

The conversation ranges from new atheism and scientific exclusivism to Stoicism, human fulfillment, empathy, and a developing God who suffers with us. An invitation and reflective dialogue on experience, purpose, and spiritual openness for truth across life. 

Related Episodes:

261. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Amanda on Love, Trauma, and Discovering a God Who Suffers With Us

260. Radically Personal: A New Philosophy of God — Life Seeking Understanding

257. What's Your Spiritual Story: Dr. Richard Oxenberg on his Spiritual Journey and the Peace That Passeth Understanding

255. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Laura Buck on Becoming Visible, Intuition, Loss & the Inner Voice

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godandautobiography.com
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

What’s Your Spiritual Story? is a continuing series from God: An Autobiography, The Podcast that invites real people to share the journeys that shaped their spiritual lives. Each episode explores how the search for meaning, identity, and connection unfolds through personal experience—and how God meets us in surprising ways.

In this week’s conversation, Amanda joins Dr. Jerry L. Martin to reflect on the path that brought her from a childhood marked by instability to a life of seeking, learning, and slowly opening toward the spiritual dimension. 

She describes how psychology and philosophy helped her make sense of the world, how meditation and sacred texts offered moments of grounding, and how discovering a God who suffers with us reshaped her understanding of love and presence. Her story highlights the quiet ways growth can emerge from vulnerability and how even confusion, pain, and uncertainty can become part of a meaningful spiritual journey.

If you’ve ever wondered whether God is present in the difficult places of life—or whether your own story “counts” as spiritual—this episode offers gentleness, curiosity, and hope. It’s a reminder that the search itself matters, and that there are many ways God reaches out along the way.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godandautobiography.com
• 📖 Get the God: Book
• 📖 Get Two Philosophers Wrestle with God

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What if theology is not a set of inherited doctrines, but life seeking understanding? 

Learn more in Jerry’s latest book, Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, and subscribe for weekly episodes that explore God, spiritual experience, and the ongoing journey of the soul.

In this second installment of Radically Personal, philosopher Dr. Jerry L. Martin explores what he calls Theology Without Walls — a seeker-centered approach that begins with direct experience rather than boundaries set by any single tradition.

Jerry reflects on the challenge of religious exclusivism, the belief that only one religion is true while others must be rejected, engaging the influential argument by Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga contends that simple logic requires believers to view other religions as false. Jerry examines this claim carefully, suggesting that many spiritual teachings once assumed to be contradictory may, in fact, illuminate different aspects of divine reality. Truth may not be limited to one place or one people.

The conversation considers how spiritual knowledge grows. Just as scientific understanding expands by taking in new insights rather than discarding what came before, religious understanding can deepen when seekers remain open to what God may disclose beyond familiar walls. Jerry proposes a different epistemic strategy — one grounded in conviction but accompanied by humility — acknowledging that human beings are limited, that divine mystery exceeds our concepts, and that God may be revealing truth in multiple traditions across the world.

This episode is a call to be rooted, open, curious, and responsive — to seek a relationship with the Divine that is radically personal.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godandautobiography.com
• 📖 Get the book

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this week’s episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore how God communicates through intuition, dreams, insights, and the quiet promptings that redirect a life. 

Their conversation speaks directly to listeners who wonder why God can feel hidden and how to recognize a true divine nudge.

Jerry reflects on the moment he heard the message “Your work here is over,” a turning point that led him away from a successful Washington career and toward writing God: An Autobiography. He describes how inner guidance can be unmistakable even when it arrives without logic or explanation.

Abigail offers her own powerful experiences, including years of divine absence in her twenties, a visionary encounter with angelic presence and prophecy, and the moral resolve that shaped her effort to remove a predatory figure from her temple. She shows how spiritual experience intersects with honor, justice, and courage in real life.

Together, Jerry and Abigail consider why divine guidance is unpredictable, how intuition challenges rational analysis, and how spiritual communication reshapes our understanding of calling and purpose. They reflect on timing, prophecy, and the ways God works through both silence and intervention.

The episode also turns toward women’s lives, agency, vulnerability, and the limits of second-wave feminism. 

Abigail reflects on what she feels called to now, and Jerry considers how her insights continue the larger spiritual and philosophical journey they share. This intimate dialogue weaves together spiritual autobiography, lived philosophy, and honest testimony. 

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
• Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

In this week’s episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Jerry L. Martin explores one of the most practical and urgent spiritual questions we face: How do we know what we’re meant to do with our lives—and how do we tell when God is guiding us?

Drawing on the Hindu concepts of dharma and swadharma, Jerry explains the difference between our role-based responsibilities and our deeply personal calling; the tasks that “have your name on them.” From there, he turns to the heart of the episode: a clear, four-step method God gave him for recognizing divine communication in daily life.

You’ll learn how God speaks through prayer, dreams, intuition, hunches, insights, and inner signals, and how to prepare yourself to receive that guidance. Jerry breaks down each step—listening, heeding, openness of heart, and sensitive attunement—as a real spiritual practice you can begin using today.

Whether you’re discerning a big life decision or simply trying to stay more connected to the sacred in everyday moments, this episode offers an accessible, experiential path for SBNR seekers looking to deepen their relationship with the Divine.

Listen in as Jerry shares how your search for God meets God’s search for you, and how the relationship unfolds from there.

Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.

From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.

Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.

Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.

What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.

What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.

What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Read the book: God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher at godanautobiography.com or Amazon
• Share your questions and reflections: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Subscribe and listen free wherever you get podcasts

Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube