Jerome A. Stone - Biography

Biography

Stone grew up in Connecticut and Rhode Island, the son of a Protestant pastor. Though his family was of modest means he had access to a broad range of books. His father taught him respect for other religions early on. He was educated in the aesthetic and moral dimensions of church life. Instead of oppressive moralism, he was given a vision of moral integrity, service and a sense of the numinous.

At the age of sixteen he left home, an early entrant to the University of Chicago. After a year of graduate studies, he transferred to Andover Newton Theological School outside of Boston, MA. His Mdiv thesis was done there on Paul Tillich’s Concept of God as the Ground of Being. He then continued his graduate training at the University of Chicago Divinity School, completing his doctorate there in 1973. His doctorate thesis was done on The Secular Experiences OF Transcendence: The Contributions of Bernard Meland, H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. During this time he served as pastor at three Congregational and United Church of Christ churches. He helped organize the Danville Council on Human Relations which is said to have become the seed bed for the first Head Start program to receive funding.

He went on to teach religion, philosophy, ethics and racism in America at Kendall College, William Rainey Harper College and later at the Meadville Theological School. Over these years he developed a strong environmentalism. In 2002, Stone wrote:

Lets get religious for a minute. What if the earth and its creatures were sacred? The sacred we treat with overriding care. What if the earth and our sibling creatures were sacred, either inherently sacred, or because they have a derivative sacredness as creatures of God... I would say that my enlightenment involves finding out that I am of the earth, earthly. The continuing task is to find out what this means and to live by it.

Stone has moved from liberal Protestantism through a flirtation with neo-orthodoxy to a more serious wrestling with Paul Tillich and finally to a Religious Naturalism shaped by Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard Meland and John Dewey.