Jim Palmer

Jim Palmer has spent three decades asking what happens when the answers we inherit can no longer carry the lives we are living.

A former evangelical megachurch pastor, Jim became a pioneering voice in religious deconstruction and reconstruction. His work now reaches beyond religion to a larger human question: how do we stay in honest contact with ourselves, one another, and the reality of being alive?

Jim is the founder of the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality and the founder and president of the Institute for Existential Health. Through his books, essays, teaching, and practitioner training, he is helping establish existential health as a field of study and practice concerned with meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and self-trust.

He is the author of seven books, including Divine Nobodies, Inner Anarchy, and Life After Religion. His eighth book, The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground, will be released October 13, 2026.