GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
250. Special Episode: Suffering, Growth & Divine Love | Celebrating 250 Episodes
Five years. 250 episodes. Countless stories of faith, struggle, and discovery.
This milestone episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast is a deep reflection on what it means to grow spiritually through suffering, to find joy again, and to experience divine love as a personal reality.
In this special episode, Scott, Jerry, Abigail, Laura, and Mandi come together to look back on the last five years and explore how this project has transformed each of them.
You’ll hear moments of vulnerability, laughter, and insight as we talk about:
- Suffering and the Law of Growth – Jerry shares God’s teaching that suffering is not meaningless but the very path by which we grow. He describes the moment he realized that God suffers with us — that when we feel pain, God says “ouch” too.
- A God Who Feels With Us – Scott reflects on his acting career and the way embodying pain on stage helped him understand the personal God who is fully present in our lives.
- Breaking Free From Spiritual Abuse – Mandi opens up about growing up in a controlling family, being told belief in God was foolish, and finally finding the courage to pray. Her first prayer was a desperate request for a job with meaning — and it was answered, leading her to this project.
- Love That Disrupts and Heals – Abigail tells the story of falling in love with Jerry, trying to remain detached, and eventually surrendering to a love that upended her carefully ordered life — and changed it forever.
- Wisdom Across Generations – Laura reflects on how her role has evolved over the years and how focusing on her own spiritual growth allows her to comfort and encourage others.
Together, the team discusses how this project invites listeners into the New Axial Age — a time when wisdom from all spiritual traditions is brought together to illuminate a richer, more connected path forward.
Start at the Beginning: Listen to Episode 1 to hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher.
Read the Book: Get your copy at Amazon or godanautobiography.com.
Share Your Story: Email us at questions@godanautobiography.com — we’d love to hear your spiritual story and may feature it on a future episode.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
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.
Share Your Story | Site | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 250.
Scott Langdon 01:21: Hello and welcome to the program. I'm Scott Langdon and I'm really excited to be joined today by the entire team as we celebrate together the 250th weekly episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Every week on Tuesdays, Jerry Martin and I, along with our producer, Laura Buck, and our copywriter and social media strategist, Amanda Horgan, meet for an hour over Zoom. Sometimes, on special occasions, like this one, Abigail will even join us. As we approached this milestone of 250 weekly podcast episodes, we wanted to celebrate this moment by doing what we each enjoy most about this project: being together and sharing our stories with one another. Looking back over these last five years, each one of us on the team has grown in ways distinct to each of us and at the same time, those elements of growth have come together to shape us as a creative team. It's our sincere prayer that what we are offering to you with this podcast will, at least in part, be a reflection of the personal relationships each one of us has with God, while also serving as an invitation for you to look more deeply into the one in whom we live and move and have our being. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon 02:55: Episode 250 seemed like the perfect time for us to reflect. Reflect not only on the podcast, but also on how we, individually and as a team, have grown and changed throughout the course of these last five years.
Scott Langdon 03:15: God tells Jerry that suffering is the law of growth in the universe.
Scott Langdon 03:20: Each of us has had our share of suffering during this time together. We've lost family members, had physical ailments and accidents, relationship difficulties and many other causes of suffering in our lives. But we've also had a great deal of laughter and compassion and tears, of both joy and empathy, as we've continued, week after week, to share our story of God with you and you with us. What brings us the most comfort in our suffering, we found, is knowing how present and personal God actually is in our lives. God understands our suffering and even our feelings about suffering. He tells Jerry, “Suffering is as bad as the people who turn against Me because of it say it is.” On a recent Tuesday Zoom meeting, Jerry, Abigail, Laura, Amanda and I connected with each other via the miracles of modern technology and had a beautiful conversation about suffering and the podcast and how we love doing it all together. Here’s Jerry.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:21: For me that's the key that when we suffer, God is suffering. God is not… I guess I tended to think of it as God is kind of distant, looking at the world, down at the world, and we are going through suffering. But that's not how it is. God is right in here, with us, inside us, in fact. And so as I was explaining, with a box cutter, jabbed my thumb, God goes ouch, that God is experiencing that too. God knows what it is to feel pain.
Scott Langdon 05:02: Whenever, I'll use a specific character, for example, when I played Paul Sheldon in Misery the Writer. So he gets in a car accident and his legs are all broken and everything's broken up and he turns out that the woman taking care of him is kind of crazy and he has to get out of there. It's a Stephen king story, right, but I had bruises painted on me and all that.
Scott Langdon 05:25: But when I had to fall out of bed and crawl across the floor and wrestle with this other actor, this woman, and make it believe as if it were real, and my body hurt, you know. I mean Paul Sheldon hurt, but Paul Sheldon, there is no Paul Sheldon without me, and so my body, when I'm done with it, when the play's over, I'm exhausted. So in that sense, how I've come to see God's personal… when I encountered you, and I'll probably talk about this. But when I encountered you, Jerry, and your work, I had gone away from this personal. The supernatural theism was, I didn't have time for it anymore. The idea of a personal God didn't make sense in that way anymore because it got you're here and I'm there and it just, it was distant.
Scott Langdon 06:19: But what I knew was more along the lines of what the more deeply personal God is, and I describe it that way that if I'm going through the suffering, it's not like He's over here also feeling it the way I feel suffering when my daughter has a terrible time. God feels it more like when Paul Sheldon is being thrown around, that Scott Langdon feels that pain. You know, it's that connected, okay, so that's how I kind of feel about it. Everybody sort of has their way of processing talking about it.
Scott Langdon 07:04: Laura Buck has been our producer since the podcast began. She was Jerry's assistant long before I came to this project and is in many ways the glue that holds this whole project together. Here's Laura now.
Laura Buck 07:23: Okay. So before I joined this podcast, or just even being part of God: An Autobiography, growing up, I was always kind of taught that bad things happened if you weren't good. Like if you did something wrong, then something bad will happen. So I always thought that when bad things happened it was because somebody wasn't being good, which doesn't make sense now, because now I know that God does not control every bad thing, like He doesn't point His finger and go you're going to have a car accident, you're going to get robbed, you know you're going to fall down today. That as people we're responsible for what we do.
Laura Buck 08:08: But now I know that when that does happen, you know somebody dies, that I know, or anything, that He's there to help make it, to help me through it. That I can lean on Him. He's there, you know. I'm not blaming Him saying like why do you let this happen? Now it's okay, it's happened. Now can I lean on you, like how can you be here for me to know that I'm not alone in that? And I think that that's something that's very comforting and powerful because I've been through some hard times with people suffering from illness. And, yeah, there were times I was like this isn't fair, why is this happening? But it's not something that He's making that person go through because they weren't an ideal person or they hurt others. So that's really changed the way I look at everything now.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:07: Yeah, I was told divine presence is itself the help, much the way it is for us with one another. You know family members who rally around, friends who rally around in a difficult moment that's not weightless. You know that has an impact, that helps us through things. We don't have to go through them alone. Being alone is one of the greatest sufferings and just to have people who love you around you and God right there, is a real source of strength in life.
Laura Buck 09:40: My stepmom came from like an old school where I remember when my dad had passed away and she was talking with the priest and saying he suffered because of his sins and I was so angry at that because my dad did everything right, you know?
Laura Buck 09:57: He went to church every Sunday, but that's how she was raised. You know, you're paying for your sins and it's just such a horrible way of looking at things. You know, will you ever be good enough, right? So this really helps clear that up.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:16: Let's see if we can draw Amanda out. Why don't you let us know? How do you answer Scott's question? How has your attitude changed during this project, from the God book or from the interaction, or just the project of spreading this word on a podcast.
Amanda Horgan 10:44: Yes, this project has really changed a lot for me and my relationship with God. I'll start from like the beginning, because I think it's something I really want to talk about today, that I think is important, that's not talked about a lot: forms of spiritual abuse. For example, for me growing up, I had a family where there was one person who was basically in control of the entire family and also was quite malicious and manipulative, and he was an abusive person in general. So having an abusive dynamic in a family is not very uncommon. But what do abusers do? They take power away from the people that they are trying to hold within their grasp. So God, and a spiritual community is not really something that a lot of people who are controlling others will allow, unless they have power within an institution already or within a group of people.
Amanda Horgan 11:58: So for us, God was presented as something that was foolish to believe. You were desperate to believe, if you believed in God. You were less intelligent if you believed in God. And as we got older, I feel I combated that enough to eventually get him to reconsider and allow us to believe, because he believed, that we were all a part of God, fragments of God, but God doesn't care about us or what we're going through or our suffering, and that was the way we were able to access God for a long time. So, for me growing up then into young adulthood, I really relied on the sciences of philosophy and psychology to kind of understand reality and truth and what was going on. And I think I was still afraid to explore God more deeply and openly and vulnerably. I was afraid to explore that because I never wanted to feel tricked by the universe, foolish for believing in God, as if God is, you know, Santa Claus or something like that. So I started exploring the sciences, like I said philosophy and psychology. And I think I started exploring a lot of the Eastern traditions because I think that kind of distanced God enough to let me kind of explore and talk about those ideas a little more freely without being met with so much resistance. And I spent a lot of time after that kind of just not feeling like I fit in anywhere really, particularly, until I started reading Epictetus' Discourses. And Stoicism doesn't really directly talk about God except for like nature, the nature of reality.
Amanda Horgan 14:18: Some Stoics do reference God and Epictetus specifically talks about like fragments of God and Providential will and things that made sense in a way that I thought of it and agreed, to the point where I was reading Epictetus’ Discourses like scripture, everyday and journaling at the same time, and it was such an odd sensation because I was reading faster and more connected and writing faster, and almost like having a conversation with the book, where I would be reading and absorbing what was happening or what this specific lecture was on, and then asking a question in my mind, journaling and then going right back to the text and boom, there was the answer. And so I called Epictetus, whether he wants or not, he's my adoptive father and I loved having this male role model on paper to dissect the world for me and help me understand it in a way that was safe. So after that, it was around the same time I graduated with my degree in psychology that I was really frustrated, looking for a job, and I think for the first time in a very long time I not only prayed in the traditional sense with, like my hands in prayer on my knees, just kind of begging the universe like please send me a job with purpose, because I can't really rally behind some of the positions I was looking at that just seemed meaningless, really truly just hitting a keyboard and putting in numbers, so that prayer was answered. I don't usually ask for, in prayer, at that point, even though I feel I had a lot of conversations with God, I would never directly ask for something. I never felt safe to do that in general in life, so I certainly didn't feel safe doing that to God at any point in time. But for this… at that moment I did specifically ask for this job.
Amanda Horgan 16:31: And, lo and behold, a couple weeks later I found this position and I remember during the interview process I was so fascinated because I was… I've been a seeker my whole life, trying to kind of figure out just life and reality in general, and I thought this was incredibly fascinating. And I was excited to read the book and I said something like I can't wait to get inside of your brain and you were like you don't have to get inside my brain, you just have to read the book and see what God's saying. And in the book you have a very similar conversation with God, and so that really drew me in. And as I'm reading it, all of a sudden I read about Lectio Divina Please cut that out. So I say it right the first time.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:33: Praying your way through the Bible.
Amanda Horgan 17:34: Yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:35: One translation.
Amanda Horgan 17:37: Yes, and I felt like when I was reading that that's what I experienced with Discourses. So, I felt like God: An Autobiography really opened up an access point that was purposefully withheld for me for such a long time to God. Because I didn't know how to pray. I think that was the biggest thing. Having you just encourage checking in with God, letting God know how it is with you. I would have never thought God cared about that. I would have thought… I would have been afraid to commune with a God like that before, and it really helps. God's not inside of your head, so it really helps as just a human being when you're praying, to really put those thoughts in your mind into words, whether it's in your own mind or out loud, to really work through it with yourself and God. And now that we're here in these projects and we're on the New Axial age, I feel really blessed, without shame, to say that I asked for this job and received it and that I deeply believe and love God.
Amanda Horgan 19:02: When I look back on my past, there were long times of isolation, too, for me, and my best friend, I think during many times, was God and who I was speaking to in my mind because, as a child, to not have certain guidance but still be able to look at things and say this isn't right, I'm not going to repeat this, this is not something I'm going to do when I'm older.
Amanda Horgan 19:17: I think that was God's voice helping me have the strength, and I was suffering, but the key was that that suffering God's love was always so much stronger. My love for my siblings affirmed to me that there is such a thing as unconditional love, and for my mom, so if I can unconditionally love, my siblings and my mom it's perfectly fathomable that there would be a God who has unconditional love for me, like a parent does for their child. And now I'm a parent of two amazing young men and I can't even express verbally the love that I have for them or how unconditional that absolutely is, and that is a hard, absolute, reality, truth that can't be contested in my mind. And so I'm just, I'm very blessed to be where I'm at today and happy to have found the project and happy to be a part of hopefully providing access to God to people who may not have had access to Him. So, that’s my story.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:28: Well, that’s a wonderful summation of our task, Amanda helping people, helping provide access to God to people who may not have that access because they don't quite know how to find it, much as at a certain point, you didn't, and maybe all of us at some point didn't. And that's what we're doing with the podcast, and that's the future of it too. That's the past, present and future of the podcast.
Scott Langdon 21:25: In one of the recent episodes that we've done in the series Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, Jerry and Abigail, you two talked about the suffering that was present day. At the time you were kind of rehashing or not rehashing, but going over what had been happening in real time, and it was a really powerful episode. Abigail, you had had a physical injury and Jerry, you know you were nursing Abigail but also dealing with some physical situations yourself, Jerry. I've been reading a really interesting book lately. by a Tibetan monk named Galang Thubten and it's called Handbook for Hard Times: A Monk's Guide to Happiness, and in it he talks about his personal story and how he became a monk and what was going on with him.
Scott Langdon 22:31: But he was talking about suffering and at some point there's this phrase and he ends it with how we choose to suffer. And I went wait a minute, let me read that again, how we choose to suffer. And I thought about that, I really took it in and I thought what's coming to me is, you know, it's not if we're going to suffer. It's not like if I'm, because I always grew up with this idea, the sort of the Job story, and the Job story meant if you were suffering, you were a bad boy, bad person doing it wrong, very along the lines of what Laura had been talking about, and so it was sort of kept you in line, if you will.
Scott Langdon 23:15: You're a bad person. You need to be a good person. You won't have suffering, and what seems to be the actual case is we're not going to be able to escape suffering. But the question is, how do we choose to suffer? And in that episode where you two were talking about your sort of present day, day-to-day suffering, what came through was that love was the bedrock on which everything else was built in terms of your relationship, in terms of how you were going to get through this suffering. Abigail, could you speak to that a little more?
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 23:54: Yeah, the conversation that you reference doesn't immediately come to mind. I'll say something about that kind of love, however, which does come to mind. When I first fell in love with Jerry, I was really quite alarmed because my life had been under control. I had a nice apartment in the neighborhood where I'd grown up, which was for me the macro world as well as the micro world, Museums and cafes, and who needs more? I had an excellent job. I didn't need anything to come and spoil it to come and, you know, rock my world to come and upend it. It was in some kind of balance, as much as one's life can be. I was divorced, but you know, one can live with divorce. So I thought I would just apropos of trying to stay above love. I was thinking to stay above it.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 25:40: I have philosophical training, as Mandi knows, that permits a certain overview, a certain degree of detachment, a global perspective, and I thought I would practice what Edmund Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction, where you take all the appearances that come to consciousness and you sort of bracket the question of how real they are, what reality they refer to, and you just observe them and you get a good sort of noncommittal, in the good sense, you know you're not engagé, you're really observing, you're learning, you're contemplating. So I thought I would do that with this feeling of love that threatened to upend my world. And so I started to do that and put it within brackets and was about to learn all you can learn about the phenomena of love, when something I hadn't planned on occurred, which was I could not maintain the detachment. Holy moly, what philosopher is any good at all if you can't be to a relevant degree detached? That's what it's all about. You're not touched, You're not invaded.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 27:23: While I was trying to look at the phenomena of love which had presented itself to me, themselves to me, I fell into what seemed to be love. You know, it was like a pit or something and I thought I know, if I struggle and I hold on to the edges, I can keep myself out of this and I'll be fine. But all my struggles, you know, to hold on to the edge of the cliff were not successful. And there I was, you know, head over heels, over my head, literally. I can't look at this with the requisite philosophical detachment. I'm in it, it's over my head.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 28:25: So, you know, I thought oh my, you know, this is a perspective I hadn't counted on, but qua philosopher, qua lover of truth, if this is truly what's going on, I can't deny it, I can't repress it or suppress it, I have to cope with it. You know, go on from there. So that's one incident that occurs to me. You might almost call the falling in love, to use the vocabulary you've spotlighted a species of suffering. You know, I'm undergoing it, I'm suffering it, I'm not the agent of it. So you know, that's scary. The other thing that occurs to me, which is rather on the other side of this story, is the evening I guess I was collecting Jerry at, was it Union Station.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:42: Yes.
Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal 29:44: And you emerged from the passenger tunnel and came up to me. If my recollection is accurate, you started telling me that you were having these conversations with God, and my thought was quite, perhaps uncommon. I don't know. You know, I haven't taken a survey, but I had thought when we fell in love that there's nothing for it. We are in love, we better act on it. At the same time, I'll be shouldering the spiritual load for two, because Jerry's an agnostic and, in a sequence described in the God book which we all know, Jerry himself discovered that this pathway led to these conversations with God.
Dr. Abigail L Rosenthal 30:57: And what I thought? You know, another girl sorry, my generation, another girl might have felt that, oh dear, he's going around the bend, but I felt the opposite. He's gonna be normal. And you know, and that's what happened, most women carry men. It's our little secret. You know, along with the man you love, you marry the male ego. And then you got to deal with that thing. And while the man in question thinks it makes him powerful, you know he's a big shot with his ego. The woman in question knows she's catering to this weakness. You know, this sense of vulnerability which the male ego compensates for. So what I think immediately perceived, perhaps in the way Jerry was talking to me, was that no, I won't have to carry this for two anymore. He's going to pull his own weight, he's gotten normal, you know. So, as I say, where another woman might perhaps feel, my man talks to God maybe we need help. I thought the opposite. We've got help. So those are two anecdotes that occur to me.
Scott Langdon 33:06: Laura, I'd like to bring it back to you. During this time that we've been doing this podcast, all of us have been through family members passing away or sense. You know, every Tuesday when we get together for our meetings on Zoom here that it's devoted to mostly you know business. Where are we? What are we looking to do in the next few episodes? But mostly it's about sort of touching base with one another and sort of seeing where we are and how we're doing. And that's one of the things that I've really loved about this job all along and has the way you've seen your own personal suffering and sort of the role you play in your family, because initially in episode number 100, when we got together and celebrated the 100th episode, you talked about being the mom, that that was sort of the role that you felt comfortable with and being in, and that's changed over the course of these five years. It's expanded, things have gone on. How do you think about those things?
Laura Buck 34:21: Well, you're right, I'm in a totally different place right now. I'm still a mom, but now I am outside of that role directly. I don't think of you as all my children, but I think you know what it is. I've come to be worried more about myself and the impact I have on others.
Laura Buck 34:44: Like I want to bring, I guess, as a mom and always like wanting to take care of people and making sure they're okay, it's when all of us get together and we have problems is, I think, having this time together just gives me a value of if I can have any sense of comfort to somebody or bring them a sense of it's going to be okay, like I always value that too. Like you say in your, you'll say, like when we come back, you'll say, like I missed everybody, like I feel that too, because we've all, like there's been so much that we've gone through full circle, all of us. I just see so much growth with that and I think knowing that we're all here for each other and care about each other, and knowing that there's someone like a higher level that cares about us, I think it brings a sense of like, peace and grace, because we're all going to also not have great experiences. We're also not going to always be perfect with everyone, but we can all come together and feel like I feel like I'm at a place where, if I can get myself to be in a good place, then I can pass that on to everybody else and that's an important thing.
Laura Buck 36:06: Like I feel, like I found a comfort in knowing where God is for me, that I can feel it. I can pass it on to others. I love to give like advice. But I also want everyone to know that you can come to someone and talk to them, but sometimes you're not really, you might be talking to that person, but I feel like you're actually talking to God as well. Does that make sense? Yeah, I just feel like there's been like a growth and now I'm able to finally focus on my growth. Right. So I'm in a different stage and we're all in different stages right now. So we've all kind of grown together so much.
Scott Langdon 36:45: One of the things I really treasure about this team is that there's pretty much three generations of life here experiencing, you know, Jerry and Abigail, Laura, you and I are around the same age and Mandi's a little younger and the perspectives I know when I first started out, I felt like I needed to learn how to do everything. My role needed to be to get everything done. And as we've moved and I was, I realized in terms of suffering. I mean, I realized I was causing a lot of my own suffering in that way by not stepping back and sort of seeing what is it that I do here, what's my role that I play here? And once we sort of sorted that out and sort of eased into that I could it's not that I ever got, you know, offended or worried about Mandi coming on board I just thought, okay, here's a younger generation who knows all this technology and AI is coming up and how can we use? And I'm thinking I don't know about AI, I can I hold, do AI? I don't know. And Mandi is there's the things that Mandi does, it's her thing, like that's what she does. And Laura does the thing that she does and Jerry does the thing he does, and Abigail, and I do the thing I do, and in a sense, that familial essence pervades not just in the generational aspect but in the you know, what do each of us bring.
Scott Langdon 38:16: And when I think about that in terms of how that might go out into the world as this podcast, this new axial age, is for every one of every age. So it's not oh, I'm too old to talk about axial age or I'm too young and you guys are… I mean this project that we're working on this multi-generational aspect and we all say I have room for Abigail's stories about Paris and Jerry about yours. I have room for all of that and I just think it makes for a pleasurable thing to do and to spend time on. And as I've gotten older, I've started to think I want to start spending my time where I feel good about the time I'm spending, you know, where I feel good about what I'm doing and the string that pulls that along, that coalesces all of that is love. And that when I was growing up, God was love. It's right in the Bible, right in the B-I-B-L-E. James says it, right God is love.
Scott Langdon 39:26: And if that's true, I think about it as a mathematical sequence. Right, I do, even with a Christian version. If Jesus is God and God is love, that means Jesus equals love. That means, if we're supposed to be like Jesus’ love that means Jesus equals love. That means, if we're supposed to be like Jesus, we're supposed to be like love. What's love like? Well, it's more than a feeling, isn't it? One of the most difficult things in suffering seems to be to distinguish between what's not my path. This doesn't feel like my path, and this is hard work, and I got to dig in. Which one is it? Is it just I got to dig in and work harder, or is it I'm going down the wrong place? Jerry, what are your thoughts on that as we kind of move forward into what this podcast is opening up and becoming?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 40:12: Well, one of the changes in the podcast that we're undergoing right now involves the project I was given in the initial prayers that are reported in God: An Autobiography and that we've got the highlights of in those first 44 episodes. But I was told to start Theology Without Walls and I didn't know anybody in that world and it wasn't my field. But I just started showing up and talking to people but I didn't tell them. I told one guy once that I got this in prayer and I in fact shared him the text of the prayer and he said don't show this to anybody else. And I think that was good advice. I can't just say, oh, Jerry Martin prayed and he got this prayer guidance.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 41:04: I've got to give an argument, and the argument was very much at hand that if all these people are aware the people I'm dealing with, who teach world religions, are aware of these traditions of revelation that God is communicating through all of them, and if so, then the argument is then we should theologize, our spiritual thinking should take it all in rather than just our own vein. You don't go back to the old mine and just pull nuggets out of the vein of our tradition. No, there's a lot of spiritual wisdom and it doesn't all replicate the others. You get something new from this tradition and that tradition, or at least different emphasis and different vocabularies and different iconographies and so on. So take them all in. And different iconographies and so on. So take them all in. But until recently I didn't tell those people except ones I got to know very well and some of those I interviewed about their spiritual stories, their spiritual autobiographies, and I didn't really bring that scholarly side into the podcast because, well, the podcast is really straight out of the God book and then our own reflections on the spiritual life and the questions and then responding to what people have written into us in the what's your story or your spiritual story, but we're bringing those together. Because of my book Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age. That was written mainly for a scholarly audience, although it's not written in scholarese. Mainly it's written in a way that any educated person can read, anyone interested in these issues, and we're bringing them all together and that includes one of the books being published in that series with my book, which is a Theology Without Walls series, is Abigail's Confessions of a Young Philosopher. So we'll be doing something with that on the podcast at some point. So we're bringing all these things together and that sort of widens the discussion, adds a new dimension to the discussion. We're continuing. I don't think we're dropping anything really, but we are adding some things, we're rotating them in and out, and I think that's going to be much richer.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 43:39: Certainly, from my point of view, it's a more integrated life than having two separate sets of activities. And I should say a word, because part of the, I mentioned the new axial age in the subtitle to my book and of course that's directly from God: An Autobiography. Toward the very end maybe it's the final chapter I'm told you're entering a new spiritual era, a new Axial Age. The old Axial Age was the age during which all the world's religions, wisdom, traditions, philosophies were founded. So it was a period of tremendous creativity and pretty much the religions all started then and have gone on since then.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 44:32: But we're now in a new era and God: An Autobiography is a revelation for our era. It's a revelation for the new axial age, for the period in which we're all now aware of the multiple religions, of the riches they offer and we have maximum access to them, not only on the internet, but in cosmopolitan countries like the US, there are multiple worship centers from all over the world are present right here, and once you start taking that in, you're never the same again, and you shouldn't be the same again. You should be thinking anew in a fresh way. It's almost like back to the drawing board with a new set of paints or something and many more colors, let's say, many more instruments, and we're all, right at this podcast, are part of it, initiating and spreading this new axial age.
Scott Langdon 45:38: Well, it's an exciting time, not only to be alive, but a very exciting time to do a podcast. What you hear is everybody's got a podcast. Well, first of all, no, they don't, but you know, but everybody has a podcast. Well, here's our podcast God: An Autobiography. And Jerry, it's been a pleasure for all of these five years coming up on five years here, celebrating 250 episodes to be with you all. Mandi, thanks for being with us. Abigail, it's so good to see you. Laura.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 46:05: And Scott, we should be giving you huge applause here. This was your idea. You read God: An Autobiography and you were hired to help with social media or something. You said, this is dramatic, it should be on the stage or in a radio drama, and so we put it on a radio drama. This was entirely your idea and, of course, you are the creative director of everything we do, and so this is your 250 episodes. In that sense, this is your oeuvre, your body of work in this venue. You have other things, of course, a body of, or several bodies of work, but this is a major body of work for a creative person, and a creative person who luckily came my way, who's deeply spiritual.
Scott Langdon 46:54: Thank you. Well, it's been my honor this whole time and I'm excited to see where we go. Good to see you all.
Scott Langdon 47:16: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.