More About the Author
Rabbi Michael Goldberg, PhD, is a nationally-acclaimed writer and speaker. He has held two university chairs in Jewish Studies, worked with the international strategic management consulting firm of McKinsey & Company, served as a professional ethicist with the Georgia Supreme Court as well as on hospital ethics committees. Rabbi Goldberg's most meaningful professional work, however, has been as a hospital and hospice chaplain, giving spiritual support and guidance to patients of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, the vast majority of whom have not been Jews, nor for that matter, practicing adherents of any "organized" religion.
Rabbi Goldberg is the author of several books, one of which, Jews and Christians, Getting Our Stories Straight, was the subject of a feature article in The New York Times, and another of which, Why Should Jews Survive?, appeared on the lead page of The Washington Post's "Sunday Book Review" section. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation and spoken before a variety of medical, legal, business, academic, and popular audiences on issues pertaining to ethics and religion.
Goldberg completed his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Yale, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Now a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform), Goldberg received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative). Following his ordination, he received his Ph.D. in systematic theology and philosophy of religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
As one of the originators of "narrative theology and ethics," Goldberg became interested in various stories linking the human with the divine. That interest in "theology-in-practice" led him to hospital and hospice chaplaincy. In that context, he often discovered just how much spiritual care his patients and families provided him. Based on his first-hand chaplaincy experience, Goldberg's most recent book, Raising Spirits: Stories of Suffering and Comfort at Death's Door, not only speaks of matters pertaining to illness and dying, but more broadly, to life itself.
