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The strange world Abigail entered under Suzanne’s influence has reached its breaking point. Letters are being sent in Abigail’s name, passports and ordinary conventions have lost their authority, and the Gnostic system that once promised access to a higher truth is carrying her farther from the ground beneath her feet. In this concluding episode of Part Three of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin follow the story through its most dramatic turn: Abbie's return to New York, hospitalization, and the intervention of a mother whose wisdom proves more durable than an elaborate philosophy. When Abbie insists that she has proved God’s power, her mother offers a devastatingly simple observation: a system can possess an internal logic and still be unreal. Later, when Abbie says she had been happy in the Gnostic religion, her mother answers that she will find “a saner happiness.” That exchange opens the way back. Abbie begins to recover confidence in the suspicions she had learned to distrust and in the reality of psyche and soma, spirit and body. The ordinary world, once dismissed as spiritually inadequate, becomes vivid again - a place worth entering rather than escaping. As Part Three of Confessions of a Young Philosopher comes to a close, Jerry and Abbie consider brainwashing, Gnosticism, sanity, feminine wisdom, and what it means to discover that truth cannot be secured by leaving reality behind. Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions follows philosophers Abigail Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin as they revisit Abigail’s philosophical memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, and the experiences that shaped her search for truth. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Abigail L Rosenthal thought she had entered a philosophical thought experiment. Now she is forced to consider something far more disturbing: whether her relationship with Suzanne has become a form of brainwashing. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Gnosticism, spiritual power, and the strange hold Suzanne has gained over Abbie's life. Abbie still cannot dismiss Suzanne as simply a con artist. Some of what she experiences seems genuinely powerful, leaving her determined to find out what is authentic, what is manipulation, and how she has been drawn so deeply into Suzanne’s world. Their conversation turns to Robert Lifton’s work on brainwashing, the use of guilt and isolation as tools of control, and the danger of a spiritual worldview in which doubt itself can be treated as evidence of failure. Abbie also identifies another force that helped keep her there: the pressures of womanhood and the fear that time was running out. Her search for truth had become entangled with the hope that ordinary limits, including chronology itself, might somehow be overcome. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Abigail L. Rosenthal is searching for a way out of a life that no longer seems to be working. Then she meets Suzanne. Suzanne speaks with unusual authority. She wants to be perfect. She calls herself a Gnostic Christian. She seems able to move through difficult situations without fear, without losing her femininity, and without accepting the limits that govern everyone else. Abigail is skeptical, but she is also fascinated. Suzanne appears to possess something Abigail desperately wants: a way to rise above the slow, grinding consequences of ordinary life. What begins as curiosity soon becomes much more serious. Abigail starts experimenting with Suzanne’s belief that spirit alone is real and that the obstacles of everyday life may not be as solid as they appear. She thinks she is conducting a thought experiment. In fact, she is undergoing a conversion. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail revisit the moment when Suzanne’s strange spiritual worldview stopped being merely interesting and began to reshape Abigail’s life. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What happens when the ideas that once gave your life direction no longer seem to work? In this episode, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore the meaning of intelligent hope as Abigail reaches a breaking point in her philosophical and personal life. After years of trying to reconcile femininity, philosophy, love, and truth, she leaves for England with many of her earlier hopes exhausted. Their conversation turns to the difference between hope and wishful thinking, why Abigail believes hope must be grounded in truth, and what it means to keep going without pretending that everything will work out. Along the way, they discuss Hegel, Aristotle, Thoreau, Gandhi, the British class system, and Abigail’s encounter with Suzanne, whose simplicity and confidence begin to suggest a different way through the confusion. At the center is a difficult question: when your old beliefs have run aground, what can still guide you forward? *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

Can a woman be feminine and a philosopher? Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore the tension between femininity and intellectual life, drawing on Abigail’s experience as a philosophy student at Penn State during a time when philosophy was often treated as a distinctly masculine pursuit. Abigail recalls being told that if she wanted to make real progress in philosophy, she would have to give up or even “destroy” her femininity. Rather than accept that choice, she tried to understand whether a woman could pursue serious philosophical thought without becoming alienated from an essential part of herself. The conversation moves through Simone de Beauvoir, Freud, feminism, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, romantic desire, cultural expectations, and Abigail’s effort to understand the philosophical divide between herself and her former lover, Pheidias. At the center is a larger question: how do you remain true to yourself when the culture around you insists that two parts of your identity cannot belong together? *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What happens when living by your ideals becomes dangerous? In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their discussion of Confessions of a Young Philosopher with the stories of John Armstrong and Anna. John was a fellow Fulbright student in Paris who wanted to test whether his ideals of courage, honor, and integrity could survive in the real world. His decision to travel through Africa would end tragically. Abigail also remembers Anna, a friend drawn to the romance of the Cuban Revolution. Her story leads Abigail and Jerry into a discussion of political idealism, revolutionary movements, and what can happen when ideals collide with reality. They also discuss Albert Camus, existentialism, the philosophy of the absurd, personal integrity, and Abigail's belief that these lives were tragic rather than meaningless. How do we know when an ideal is worth following? When does courage become recklessness? And what does it really mean to live by what you claim to believe? Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions 2.3 explores courage, revolution, idealism, tragedy, and the difficult cost of conviction. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal continue their conversation about the aftermath of Abigail’s first love and the complicated truth she carried home from Paris.  Abigail reflects on heartbreak, secrecy, the loss of innocence, and why telling the truth can sometimes distort an experience rather than preserve it. The conversation explores romantic disappointment, privacy, cultural expectations for women, psychoanalysis, and Abigail’s search for narrative continuity as she tries to understand what the relationship meant and what would follow from it.  Jerry and Abigail also consider whether women today have enough space to acknowledge the emotional consequences of first love and heartbreak without reducing those experiences to familiar social or psychological categories. Get a glimpse into next week’s episode as Abigail begins the story of her friend John Armstrong, a fellow Fulbright scholar whose ideals would lead him on a journey with tragic consequences. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What does it mean to be one of God’s chosen people, and why does the Jewish covenant carry both honor and an impossible burden? In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal explore “Of the Impossible Position of the Jews,” the opening chapter of Part Two of Abigail’s book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Jerry and Abigail discuss the meaning of the Jewish covenant, why the Jews became a “pilot project” in humanity’s relationship with God, and how the Hebrew Bible introduced a vision of history in which human actions are seen, remembered, and judged. Abigail describes God as the divine witness whose presence gives moral significance to what people do in the real world. Their conversation also examines the burden of being God’s chosen people, the high expectations placed upon the Jews, Jewish self-criticism, supersessionism, moral responsibility, and the difference between aggression and self-defense. Ultimately, the discussion reaches beyond Jewish history to ask whether every person is called to live in partnership with God, conscious that our actions matter and that our lives unfold under the “white light of truth.” *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What does desire reveal about the difference between men and women? In this episode, married philosophers Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin return to a striking passage from Confessions of a Young Philosopher: “My heavy head of hair bent under his dominion.” The word dominion is deliberate. Abigail does not mean cruelty, degradation, or the loss of freedom. She means the peculiar power of eros: the experience of being enveloped and overcome within an embrace while remaining fully oneself. The conversation moves from Abigail’s life in Paris to Plato, Rodin’s The Kiss, Adam and Eve, and the modern effort to make relations between men and women entirely symmetrical. Abigail argues that erotic life has its own form and its own meanings, asymmetrical in nature, which lovers do not invent but discover. Has modern culture confused equality with sameness? Has it concealed the difference between domination and erotic dominion? And what is lost when sex is reduced to biology, recreation, or power? In this intelligent and unusually candid discussion, Abigail and Jerry consider desire, sexual difference, and the forgotten choreography of eros. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

After her violating experience with Phidias leaves Abigail frightened, heartbroken, and facing the possibility of pregnancy, she turns to her friend Harper. Instead of judgment, Harper gives Abigail the gift of recognition. Understanding more than Abigail expects, she offers practical help, kindness, and what Abigail later calls “that pearl without price”: feminine solidarity. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin explore female friendship, abortion and sin, feminine innocence, romantic idealism, and the vulnerability women often learn to hide. Their conversation also returns to Phidias and to the uneasy distance between romantic love and the cold, clinical language that can make intimacy feel ordinary or shopworn. What can one woman offer another when innocence has been shaken and the future feels uncertain? Sometimes, the beginning of an answer is simply discovering that someone else understands. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In Part 1.3 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their conversation on Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher. After her innocence has been taken through seduction and manipulation, Abigail confronts a more difficult truth: beneath the violation, there may also have been something like love. Looking back on her first romantic relationship, she reflects on the authority of intuition, the pity that can arise from love, and the desire to repair an experience that cannot be undone. Jerry and Abigail examine the mixture of manipulation and romantic idealization that shaped the relationship, including the young man’s vision of Abigail as Dante’s Beatrice and an embodiment of the eternal feminine. Yet the episode moves beyond the question of whether he loved her. It asks what happens when first love, injury, innocence, and philosophical longing become impossible to separate. At the riverbank, believing herself ruined and without a future, Abigail considers whether her life has ended along with her innocence. Philosophy offers another possibility: to continue the argument, live through the unanswered questions, and pursue the unfinished love of wisdom. The conversation ultimately turns toward a question Abigail would later ask two women considering suicide: What did you originally want before disappointment made life seem hopeless? After innocence, what remains is not a simple answer, but the unfinished work of understanding love, injury, and the life one had originally hoped to live. *** Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In Part 1.2 of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail L. Rosenthal and Jerry L. Martin continue their conversation on Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher. In Paris, a café conversation between two young philosophy students turns suddenly from politics to love. What begins as argument and intellectual sparring becomes Abigail’s first romantic encounter, forcing her to confront not only desire, but innocence, vulnerability, and the meaning of a woman’s body in the eyes of another. Jerry and Abigail explore the unsettling philosophical backdrop of the scene: a world shaped by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, and Marx, where innocence can no longer easily be defended. Abigail reflects on erotic validation, existential terror, the loss of a hoped-for future, and what she calls “the rights of inhibition” — the possibility that hesitation and restraint may protect something real. Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What does it mean to be desired—and what happens if you are not? In Part One of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, Abigail L. Rosenthal arrives in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship and encounters a culture that seems to make space for romantic love in a way that 1950s America did not. Along the Seine, in the cafés, and throughout the Latin Quarter, she observes a world shaped by different assumptions about love, desire, and the place of romance in human life. In this episode of Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, Abigail and Jerry L. Martin explore the influence of the medieval love story Tristan and Iseult, the French understanding of romantic passion, and a question that haunted many young women of Abigail's generation: Is being desired part of what it means to become a fully realized woman? Their conversation examines the tension between intellectual ambition and romantic longing, the relationship between feminine identity and fulfillment, and the challenge of pursuing high ideals while remaining honest about the realities of love and desire. Drawing on Jewish history, philosophy, and personal experience, Abigail reflects on why she resisted what she saw as "Plan B" answers to life's deepest questions and why truth, for her, had to be sought in lived experience rather than abstraction. Part memoir, part philosophical conversation, and part cultural history, this chapter introduces one of the central themes of Confessions of a Young Philosopher: how to reconcile the search for meaning with the realities of love, desire, and human vulnerability. Join us as we continue Abigail's journey through Paris, philosophy, romance, and the questions that would shape the rest of her life. Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

What do you carry with you when you leave home for the first time? In Married Philosophers Discuss Confessions, philosophers Jerry L. Martin and Abigail L. Rosenthal revisit Abigail's memoir, Confessions of a Young Philosopher, chapter by chapter.  Married for decades, they look back together on the experiences, relationships, ideas, and historical events that shaped the young woman Abigail once was, and the life she would eventually build. In this opening episode, they begin with the book's preface and Abigail's departure for Paris on a Fulbright fellowship. As she reflects on the beliefs she carried with her into adulthood, the conversation explores true love, erotic desire, cynicism, faith, Jewish identity, and the determination to test ideas through lived experience rather than merely admire them from afar. Along the way, Abigail recalls growing up in a household shaped by Holocaust memory, her parents' efforts to help refugee families escape Europe, her mother's role in exposing a suspected Nazi operative in New York during World War II, and an unforgettable encounter with Raphael Lemkin, the architect of the Genocide Convention. Part memoir, part philosophical conversation, and part historical reflection, this episode introduces the themes that run throughout Confessions of a Young Philosopher: love and longing, intellectual ambition, faith and doubt, family history, moral responsibility, and the search for meaning in a complicated world. Join us as we begin the journey through Confessions of a Young Philosopher and follow Abigail's story from Paris and first independence through love, loss, philosophy, friendship, desire, and the unexpected lessons of a life fully lived. Join the discussion and explore a life lived philosophically. Get the book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher: https://a.co/d/1ypibqo Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal is a distinguished philosopher, educator and author of Confessions of a Young Philosopher, (following the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau, but from a woman’s perspective, with illustrations) and of A Good Look At Evil, Pulitzer-nominated. Through her platform, Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column, Abigail engages her audience with thought-provoking blogs and podcasts, discussing among other things the fascinating intricacies of women’s lives and shedding light on contemporary experience. Her philosophical and other articles span a wide range of topics which can be found in academia. She is also the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way by Henry M. Rosenthal, her late father.

In this deeply personal and spiritually rich episode, philosopher Jerry L. Martin is joined by Abigail L. Rosenthal on his podcast God An Autobiography for an intimate conversation about divine encounters, spiritual awakening, and what it means to experience a radically personal God.  Drawing from Jerry’s new book Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, the discussion explores how spiritual truth is not one-size-fits-all and why each individual’s connection to the divine can look entirely unique. Jerry reflects on being called to tell God’s story across different cultures and religious traditions, while Abigail shares a powerful mystical experience that sustained her through a long and painful chapter in her life.  Together, they discuss Jewish philosophy, personal spirituality, the rejection of Original Sin, and how trusting one’s inner spiritual compass can lead to deep transformation. This episode speaks directly to seekers, skeptics, and anyone exploring their own spiritual path. It is a thoughtful and emotional journey into faith and doubt, divine presence, mystical experience, and the call to live with spiritual purpose. Explore more about Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Get Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a [email protected] live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews.  To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.