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What happens when the search for truth becomes a search for God?

In this episode of What’s Your Spiritual Story?, philosopher Alex Woollends joins Jerry L. Martin to share an intellectual and deeply personal journey shaped by conscience, philosophy, spiritual discernment, and the desire to become a better person.

Alex describes growing up around religious belief while struggling with explanations that did not satisfy his questions. His search led him through libertarianism, ethical intuitionism, philosophical idealism, and the work of thinkers including Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, George Berkeley, Plato, Carl Jung, Michael Huemer, Gene Callahan, and J. Budziszewski.

Along the way, Alex began to see conscience not merely as a feeling, but as a genuine source of moral knowledge. He came to question ideology itself, explore the spiritual nature of reality, and consider whether truth must ultimately be discovered through lived experience.

That journey eventually brought him to God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher. In its account of divine reality, interconnectedness, transformation, and human participation in God’s ongoing action, Alex encountered ideas that closely reflected the path he had already been following.

Together, Jerry and Alex explore the relationship between philosophy and religion, the meaning of conscience, the limits of ideology, the nature of ultimate mind, the significance of Jesus, and the possibility that becoming a better person can help make the world itself better.

This is a thoughtful conversation for anyone searching for truth, wrestling with belief, questioning inherited religion, or wondering how philosophy can become a lived spiritual path.

Join the conversation on the Ultimate Questions Substack: Does each of us have a personal calling that responds to something beyond ourselves?

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.

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