Today's diverse and abundant spiritual landscape offers enormous opportunity for learning and growth. Here, author, spiritual counselor, and public speaker Philip Goldberg draws on more than 50 years of experience to host conversations that can help you make sense of it all and transform your life. You’ll meet teachers, scholars, and experts from a range of traditions (and no tradition), some who are well-known, others who should be well known, all with wisdom to impart. The aim is to help you expand your awareness and deepen your practices as you move along your chosen path.
Note: Both Phil and Spirit Matters itself are members of the Association for Spiritual Integrity and pledge to abide by its Honor Code of Ethics and Good Practice. Interview guests are expected to uphold similar standards; those who are proven to exploit or abuse will not be platformed.
Ann Gleig is a Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. Her research specialties include Buddhism in America and American spiritualities that draw on Buddhism and Hinduism. On a personal level she has practiced in the Insight and Tibetan Nyingma traditions of Buddhism and has been a student of the Diamond Approach for over two decades.
She is author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, which was published in 2019, the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Buddhism from 2024, and the co-editor of the anthology Homegrown
Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism. Plus, two forthcoming books. One of them, co-authored with Amy Langenberg, is about sexual abuse in American Buddhism, which we talked about in this interview. The other, now available from the University of Georgia
Press, is titled Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements. We focused on that as well, along with related topics having mainly to do with sexual abuse in American spiritual circles and the most efficacious ways to understand it, confront it, and prevent it.
NOTE: in the latter part of the interview there is a glitch in the recording. Ann is referring there to the fraternity house sex scandal at Cornell University.
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12 Oct 2026
A Saint and the Antichrist with Matthew Fox
The prolific and provocative priest, Matthew Fox, returns to Spirit Matters to speak about two totally different but strangely relate new books. Fr. Fox
earned a doctorate in the History and Theology of Spirituality from the
Institut Catholique de Paris and was a priest in the Dominican order for more than 30 years before running into trouble with the Vatican. He subsequently became an Episcopal priest, renowned as an innovative theologian, author, and outspoken activist for social justice.
His 44 books have been translated into other languages more than 70 times. Among them are Original Blessing; The Coming of the Cosmic Christ; One River, Many Wells; The Hidden Spirituality of Men; Christian Mystics; and The Pope’s War. His work has contributed a great deal to the modern rediscovery of the Christian mystical tradition and to a rethinking of Christian theology.
As the founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in California, he has
reinvented forms of education and worship. His Cosmic Mass, which mixes music, dance, and other contemporary art forms with the western liturgical tradition, has been celebrated more than 100 times in cities throughout North America.
He conducts dozens of workshops each year, serves as visiting scholar at the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe NM, and
continues to turn out books. Here, we talk about two of them: The
Beloved Will Guide You: St. John of the Cross and the Triple Dark Night of Our Times, and the provocatively titled Trump and the MAGA Movement as Antichrist. This conversation is not to be missed.
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28 Sept 2026
Perennial Wisdom Revisited and Reloaded with Dana Sawyer
Dana Sawyer is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and World Religions at the Maine College of Art & Design and the author of biographies of both Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith. His primary expertise is in Hinduism and Buddhism but his work has focused on comparative mysticism, theories of the “perennial philosophy,” and the value of psychedelic experience in the study of mysticism. His most recent book is The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded, which we discussed on this show when it was released two years ago. We spoke about all the above and a lot more about life on the spiritual path. NOTE: If you’re going to be anywhere near Portland Maine on October 31, come to the workshop Dana and Phil are leading together. Details and registration here.
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