Respect for persons is a fundamental moral, ethical, and spiritual principle. On that foundation, my privacy policy may be simply stated. Your email address and any personal information you provide will be used only to send you updates that you have requested. I will never share your details with third parties. You can unsubscribe or request deletion of your data at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in our emails or by contacting me at jeff@universalfamily.org.
To learn more about me, you can see the revised preface of my new book about the life and gospel of Jesus–A Taste of Joy and Liberty: A Philosopher Encounters the Gospel of Jesus.
My childhood spiritual experience began at age four—was it in a dream?—with a realization of the spirit of God pervading the Sunday school classroom. On my sixth birthday, after blowing out the candles on the cake, I was asked what I wished for. I softly revealed my evangelistic heart: “I want everyone to know Jesus.” By then, I would rise early in the mornings and go to the family room before everyone else was up. I would read the Bible, often with tears. I especially recall being moved by the Book of Matthew. At one point when I was seven, I looked up to heaven and dedicated myself to the quest for perfection.
I was sixteen when I started to discover truth, beauty, and goodness as a trio of bright, calm, luminous spiritual values—which I came to realize were also present in Jesus. At twenty-six, after an undergraduate philosophy degree at Stanford, then as a philosophy graduate student at Northwestern University, thanks to The Urantia Book, I committed myself to integrating all these inputs to help form a new philosophy of living. Science, philosophy, spiritual experience, natural beauty, aesthetics, ethics—all were essential.
At the same time, I came to see the gospel as the spiritual crown of the new philosophy. The gospel has many aspects to it, but one pair of aspects struck me in particular: the concept of God as a loving and merciful Father and humankind as a universal family.
I did extra study for a year at Fuller Theological Seminary and two years in religious studies including some teaching in the University of Toronto. In evangelism, when I go door-to-door, I say: “I’m your neighbor, Jeff, encouraging you in the faith that you are a son or daughter of God.” I smile, fall silent, and let the conversation go forward from there. I often ask Christians what it means to them to be a daughter or son of God. I volunteered for ten years with an evangelistic group answering listener mail from around the world as part of a radio broadcast ministry. When I would give a talk, I would often close by saying, “Always know that you are a divinely created, infinitely loved, spiritually indwelt, evolutionary, free-will, son or daughter of God!”
My commitment to the gospel as a trained philosopher led me to specialize in the golden rule of treating others as you want others to do to you. Oxford University Press published my book, The Golden Rule (1996). My mature philosophy is set forth in Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (Cascade, 2016). When this book was off to the publisher, I was planning to dedicate my life to teaching the new philosophy that I describe in that book.
But within a few months, I became aware of being drawn to some specifically spiritual project. I went to speak with a prophetic minister whose sermons I had always found insightful. He had read my second book and called me to write a third one, building on the sections on Jesus in the second one. At this point in my life, writing another book was the last thing on my mind.
Nevertheless, after a few weeks, in a dream, I reconnected with a project that I had long honored. My book would promote a planetary spiritual renaissance by helping followers of Jesus come to know him and his gospel better. Working on each chapter, I had to grow in relation to the topic and apply the lessons in my life before I could get the clarity needed to finish the chapter.
You can write me at jeff@universalfamily.org