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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

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Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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

Questions? Comments? Text Us!

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