Author: Jerry L Martin

Jerry L Martin, Ph.D., D.H.L. is former Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder and Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a contributor to the Good Men Project and coordinator of the Theology Without Walls Project at the American Academy of Religion.

Alasdair MacIntyre RIP

August 12, 2025

My friend, Alasdair MacIntyre, died this year. I call him my friend, although our paths crossed only intermittently. I first met him, when he was speaking in Boulder. “I may be a member of the Moral Majority,” he told me. Well, I was too, in a similarly modulated way. Later, when After Virtue appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, I asked him whether he had been prepared for the celebrity. “Not at all,” he said, “not in the least.” But he took it in stride and it served him and his world audience well.

Alasdair owed me nothing. We had never been colleagues or in any other special relationship. Nevertheless, he offered a generous endorsement whenever I asked for it. A few years ago, as he was growing older, lest I leave something important unsaid, I send him a note thanking him for his many kindnesses.

He wrote back that he owed the greater debt to me. For what? For having shared my God experience with him. Though defending one set of philosophical battlements after another over the years, he came, before the end, to have an open soul. God bless him!

Mano-a-mano with Nurse Ratched

August 12, 2025

The procedure went smoothly and I was able to watch the monitor as the surgeon snaked a catheter up from my groin to a major coronary artery.  The blocked place was easy to spot, and he inserted a stent to keep it open.

Opening an artery is a very serious matter.  If it starts bleeding, it can be life-threatening.  The patient has to lie flat on his back and absolutely still for twenty-four hours.  Nurses at my first hospital had been wonderful, but here I was attended by a woman who was Nurse Ratched without the charm.  She seemed to resent the fact that patients needed her help.  Finding it difficult to manage the bedpan flat on my back, I asked for her help.  She acted as if it were a dirty-minded request and responded by threatening me, “If you can’t manage the bedpan, we will catheterize you.”  Finally, I did manage, and the twenty-four hours were up.

Another patient had told me that closing up the artery can be painful as well as dangerous.

“Who is to perform this delicate operation?”

Nurse Ratched gave me the grim news:  young Mr. Sizzorhands, the very technician whose previous efforts to hurt me had been foiled, would now have a really good shot at it.  I told her I wanted someone else to do it.  She made it a battle of wills.  “He is the only technician available.”

“I am not going to let that guy lay another hand on me.”

We went back and forth.  Finally I said, “Let me speak to the doctor.”

She said she would see what she could do and, after a time, she returned with a young Asian-American attendant.  He had the hands of an angel.  I didn’t feel a thing.

 

A Time of Mending is Needed

July 19, 2025

 

Mankind does not live in a period for a Great Prophet.  There can be no new Moses or other Deliverer.  There can at best be Elijahs—prophets and seers—people who explain My story in a form that can be understood by this age.

A time of mending is needed, but the nature of the world today prevents the presentation of a single, unitary vision.  The best I can do is to share visions with particular individuals and let them articulate these visions in their own voices.

Yes and No

July 10, 2025

I read more of Conversations with God on a long coast-to-coast flight, occasionally pausing to pray about this or that, and writing the brief answer in the margins.  I asked about the following statements Walsch attributes to God.

“You are living your life the way you are living your life, and I have no preference in the matter.”

Wrong.

“This is the grand illusion in which you have engaged:  that God cares one way or the other what you do.”

Wrong.

“You are in a partnership with God.  We share an eternal covenant.  My promising to you is to always give you what you ask.”

Yes.

“The promise of God is that you are His son.  Her offspring.  Its likeness.  His equal.”

Yes and No.  Partners, yes.  Both necessary, yes.  The same in scope and power, no.

“I tell you this:  all you see in your world is the outcome of your idea about it.”

Too simple, but the overall direction is correct.

“The person who has the ‘faith to move mountains,’ and dies six weeks later, has moved mountains for six weeks.”

He has stated it all too simply and so the answer is off-center.

“I tell you this:  every experience you have, I have.”

Yes.

What He Said, I Said

July 5, 2025

God had explained that He is a Person, but not a human being.  “But Jesus is.”

Yes.

“Then how can it be right to say that Jesus is identical with God, that he is God?  Two beings cannot be identical if one is human and one is not, one is mortal and the other is not.”

This notion of identity is not helpful here.  Jesus’ whole heart and soul and mind were one hundred percent infused with Me.  What he said, I said—just as what you are writing now is what I am telling you.  And some of your thoughts are put there by Me, which means they are Mine, because they are put there by an indwelling of Me in you, a partial merge, if you will.  This is not just inspiration.  When I enter something, I really enter it—become infused—”intermingled” is too weak a word because the elements are no longer separately identifiable.

Well, all that was a lot to take in.  I would have to “let it percolate” as Miss Finley, my high-school Latin teacher, used to say.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

June 27, 2025

I have been behind – or barely keeping up – on several important fronts. Here is the brief explanation I sent a friend some weeks ago, shortly after Abigail broke a hip, minutes before we were to present papers at the NE AAR:

I have been overwhelmed since the first May 2 mishap. We had a second episode, after being released from Acute Rehab, when, while at home doing rehab with occasional helpers, Abigail’s was extremely weak. They measured her blood pressure: 60/40! I have never heard of so low a blood pressure. There was another drama, which I will spare you, that delayed our calling 911, but when we did, they could barely believe that she was sitting up, able to talk to them. They immediately put in two pints of blood and another pint a day or two later. They were not sure of the source of the bleeding but it turned out to be a bleeding ulcer. They cauterized it. That didn’t quite work, so they did it again. She is now at home and has resumed rehab exercises that may last for many weeks. For me, the impact has been as much emotional as well as being somewhat run ragged. When I fell in love, I was aware that I had a new vulnerability. I have learned to live alone – after a divorce, that can be a relief – but, having found my true love, it would be immeasurably harder to go on alone. That concern has taken the stuffing out of me.

As I now reflect on events, I recall Abigail’s asking the nurses, in a stream of medical queries, “tell me, why do bad things happen to good people?” They smiled and shook their heads. Years ago, she had asked her friend, the Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod. His answer: “Our people on working on it and hope to have an answer soon.” Although, in God: An Autobiography and in Radically Personal, I find clues, this is and remains the unanswerable question.

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Explore more reflections in God: An Autobiography and Radically Personal

Today Is Tomorrow: A Dream About Divine Purpose | Jerry Martin’s Daybook

June 24, 2025

Telling God’s Story, One Entry at a Time

Reflections from Jerry’s Daybook and Episode 236 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast

Today is Tomorrow

“I want you to tell My story.”

When Jerry L. Martin first heard God speak, he didn’t believe in God. He was a philosopher, a lifelong agnostic. And yet, the voice that came to him was unmistakable. 

As Jerry describes in Episode 236 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, God asks for something more intimate than a retelling of ancient scripture. He asks for a life lived in dialogue with the divine.

That calling continues today, not just in Jerry’s books and podcast recordings, but in the quiet insights he captures in his Daybook. 

In the entry below, Jerry recounts a dream that unexpectedly opens into spiritual insight. It’s a dream about timing, meaning, and what it might mean to live each day paying attention to God.

Today is Tomorrow

Daybook Entry: “Today Is Tomorrow”

I had the following dream. Some people were hosting a group to discuss the God book with me. As we drove to their house, we noticed some neighbors who were coming to join the meeting. To my surprise (actually, shock), when Abigail and I arrived, there was a whole crowd there, lined up in rows on lawn chairs in the front yard. They were facing a porch to be used as a speaking platform.

I had not planned to give a speech, and had nothing prepared, but I said to Abigail, “I think I had better get up there and give a talk.”
“Well, YE-AH!” she replied.

So I got up on the porch and looked at the crowd. I said, “SOMEBODY has done a great job of getting this crowd together,” and I saw a guy toward the back beam at the compliment. Chatting for a moment with someone in the front row, I said apropos of I know not what, “Today is tomorrow.” And then I said, “That wouldn’t be a bad name for a speech.” So I said to the crowd, “I did not have a speech prepared but talking with this person up front, I realized that ‘Today is tomorrow.’”

I am not usually glib but this time I launched on an elaborated discussion of the ways in which today prepares for tomorrow—enacts it in advance, you might say—and what happens tomorrow is that today’s preparation plays out. And today is, in fact, every tomorrow, and so on in that vein.

“This isn’t bad,” I thought, “though it is a lot like a Hallmark card version of a lifemanship presentation.” Then the scene faded.

Superficial or not, I was probably onto something. I have long felt that I should live every day as if the sum of my life as a whole depended on what I do now and here. My thought is not so much that what you do today sets the terms of what you are able to do tomorrow, though that is true. But my thought is more about the meaning of life, as if the highest ideal I am able to live right now casts a meaning over the whole of my life. Whether that is wisdom or just a facsimile of it, I can’t know. I occupy the thought, and can’t see over its rim. Maybe you can.

God: An Autobiography Book And Podcast

Listen to the Episode That Inspired This Post

In Episode 236, Jerry shares the moment God asked him to “tell My story,” and how we each have a part to play in that story, if we’re willing to listen.

🎧 Listen now or start from Episode 1 to hear the full journey.

Evolution, Animals, Creation

Man is Important But so is the Rest of Creation

June 19, 2025

The previous prayer continued, but something I received later might be helpful here.  I had been guided to read about evolution and animal behavior.

“Why read this, Lord?”

You need to understand—to have enough concepts to understand—My history with the world, including all forms of life.  Part of the distortion in religions is they are homocentric (anthropocentric).  Man is important, but so is the rest of creation.  My history involves close interaction at every level.  Every level is part of the healing, re-creation of the world, its unfolding, fulfillment.

God's Hands Holding A Child

“Consciousness is Quite a Miracle”

June 5, 2025

Life is at first of a very low level—something like bacteria and viruses—tiny bits of life—moss and slime.

I asked, with some edge, “Lord, did You interact in a personal way with moss and slime?”

It is better if you don’t interrupt with questions.  Just listen.  Questions can come later.

Remember that I am learning all the way.  I do not know what the final product may be.  Man, as he now exists, is not the final product—only the future will tell us, including Me, that.  I feel My way, pulled forward by a felt telos or goal emergent in each step, the way an intellectual project often develops from one insight to another.  I am pulling life forward, eliciting the development of its potential, drawing it to more complex forms.

In this process, consciousness is quite a miracle, even from My point of view.  I had consciousness before, but I didn’t think of it that way.  I just was, and matter was.  It was quite startling to see other consciousness develop.  Previously (all) consciousness had been coextensive with and hence identical with Me.  It did not make sense to think of there being others as well.