The author is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Medical Center and also a physician with the Veterans Health System. As a professor, the author has written over 50 peer-reviewed publications in the medical literature. As an editor, the author has edited and reviewed manuscripts from the leading journals in the field. In addition to being a doctor and professor, the book is inspired by the author’s journey as a patient, suffering from a rare cardiac condition. Faced with his own mortality, and armed with academic knowledge of the condition that he was suffering, the author sought to revisit fundamental questions to what it means to be a good person. This was difficult to do, because asking fundamental, holistic questions is challenging in an academic setting. The reasons why academia is not conducive to holistic questions are many, but centrally, academia in the 1700s fundamentally changed course, with a separation between the sciences and spirituality. Prior to that era, knowing the universe was both a spiritual and a scientific task, and scientists often took both duties seriously. In our current era of increasingly acrimonious debate between atheists and theists, the complementary nature of science and spirituality is even more obscured by post-modern discussions. But based on his personal health challenges and his experience as a physician and professor, the author of this book sought to reconcile the gap between the sciences and spirituality. And the more he focused on this gap, the more it was clear that scientific and spiritual questions have a complementary role.
