266. What’s Your Spiritual Story: Abigail's Confessions on Childhood, Time, and Spiritual Awakening

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. 

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• 📖 Get the God: Book
• 📖 Get Confessions of a Young Philosopher

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Chapters

• 0:17 Introduction to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast
• 1:00 Introduction to What's Your Spiritual Story: Abigail's Confessions
• 2:08 Edenic Childhood, Presence, and the First Experience of Boredom
• 8:50 Death, Authority, and the Question of God’s Nearness
• 11:30 Time as Crisis: The Vanishing Present and Existential Anxiety
• 15:40 Homesickness and Consolation: Joseph, Egypt, and The Odyssey
• 19:45 Feminine Role Models and the Meaning of Womanly Know-How
• 24:20 A Genius Father and the Formation of Intellectual Taste
• 28:05 Quaker Camp, Gandhi, Pacifism, and the Pursuit of Purity
• 33:40 Testing Spiritual and Political Ideals in Real Life
• 36:40 Paris, Existentialism, Sexual Innocence, and Disillusionment
• 41:30 Materialism, Fidelismo, and the Limits of Revolutionary Idealism
• 46:30 Searching for Newness: Leaving Columbia for Philosophy’s Edge
• 49:40 Penn State, Male Philosophy, and the Cost to Femininity
• 54:20 London, Class, and a Culture Without a Place for Women
• 58:30 Street Smarts, Gnosticism, and the Danger of Spiritual Manipulation
• 1:03:10 Brainwashing, Rescue, and Immunity to Ideological Guilt
• 1:08:40 Guilt as Control: Moral Absolutism and the Refusal of False Innocence
• 1:11:12 Outro and Contact: Stay Connected