GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

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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: [email protected]
Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal
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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 [email protected]
📖 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.
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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:
 [email protected]
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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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: [email protected]
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Questions? Comments? Text Us!
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: [email protected]
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