Category: Featured

“Pray and I Will Tell You”

May 14, 2026

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

The moment of death is every moment.

May 7, 2026

“The moment of death is every moment.”

There had been a time when getting tenure had been the most important thing in the world to me.  For an academic, it is a matter of professional life or death.  I had loved my years at the university.  Surrounded by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder valley is a little piece of heaven.  But teaching philosophy was no longer my calling.  It was time to move on.

That does not mean that giving up tenure was an easy decision to make.  Nor should it have been.  Congressional staff have no job security at all.  They routinely lose their jobs because the congressman dies or retires or runs for another office.  Or it can be more dramatic.  One congressman who had given no hint of dissatisfaction came into his office one day and simply fired everybody, effective immediately.

So the risk was real, but the risk of not making the change was real also.  Time is the most important asset you have in life.  T. S. Eliot tells us, “The moment of death is every moment.”  The moment of death is an epitaph defining the meaning of one’s life and, if Eliot is right, so is every moment.  There is an urgency to life.  If there is something important to you to do, you should do it now.

So I thought, what is the worst case scenario?  I could always work for my father, who had a business selling advertising specialties—items like pens and calendars with ads for small businesses to give to their customers.  I did not think I would be happy doing that, but it would put food on the table.  So I sent in my letter of resignation.  A week later the letter was returned.  I had “forgotten” to sign it.  As I left the university, the Denver Post ran a feature about my job change.  I told them that giving up tenure was “like jumping out of an airplane with an untested parachute.”

On Being Alive

On Being Alive: Reflections from Toy Story | Daybook

April 3, 2026

I have always loved animated features. There was a dearth after the decline of the old Disney Studios but, after some time, new studios started a post-Disney style that continues to develop. They make great watchables for doing my exercises, since they are upbeat and don’t require detailed attention. 

A great series I have been watching is the Toy Stories triad. They have almost metaphysical penetration. What is it to be a toy? What makes a toy’s life meaningful? What brings a toy ALIVE? Each belongs to a particular youngster and, as one explains, “When Andy plays with me, I feel as if I am alive!” 

The toys live in fear of several things. One is spring cleaning, when, if they are broken or out of date, they risk being put in the annual yard sale. In fact, one is sold – to a dealer who recognizes this is an original Woody from a famous cowboy collection. It will complete a set he can then sell for good money to a Japanese toy museum. Woody is desperate to return home to his kid, but learns that the other toys in the set have been languishing in a box. To be sold to a museum is their way back into the visible world. Andy is now torn, feeling loyalty both to his kid and to the other toys in his set. The cowgirl in the set accuses him of being selfish and he feels the sting. But then he looks at the bottom of his boot and it says “Andy” and it is as if this is his true love. He says to the cowgirl, whose kid was Emily, “Wouldn’t you give everything just to have another hour with Emily?” “Yes!” she admits. So he escapes home. 

That was Toy Story 2. Toy Story 3 introduces a new set of dilemmas and conflicts, all from a deep ability to emphasize with, well, toys. Why not? 

Experience God: An Autobiography

“Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today?”

March 26, 2026

How God Comes To Different People:

I had been told that culture is a factor in divine revelations.

“Lord, why is culture so important?”

That’s like saying, why language?  If I am going to communicate with people, they need a language.  For the same reason, they need a culture.

“They need a culture, but why such a variety of cultures?”

There are many ways of realizing (actualizing) the human story.  Culture enables lives of different (types of) significance (meaning).

“But why, in terms of Your story?”

I need to come to people in all their particularity, not to mankind-as-such.  The Chinese is one way of being.  The primitive is one way of being.  I come to each in its own terms.  Each enables Me to show a different side of Myself.

Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today? to you?

Learn more about how God comes to different people.

The Courage to Doubt in an Age of Certainty

The Courage to Doubt in an Age of Certainty | Jerry L. Martin’s Daybook

March 12, 2026

The other night 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 at this moment 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. 

Just take in what comes to you.

March 12, 2026

Just take in what comes to you.

 “Lord, how should I approach the ancient scriptures?”

Get into the frame of mind for reading the (particular) work.  That frame of mind is reverential, quiet, respectful, open-hearted.  It does not consist of analyzing metaphors and stories of gods.  Just take in what comes to you.

That guidance cut against my own scholarly training, but from then on I tried to read not only with an open mind but with an open heart.