About

Tom Huening

Thomas (Tom) Huening was a carrier-qualified Navy jet fighter pilot, commercial airline pilot, lawyer, CPA, elected county supervisor, and controller. His third and most recent book, Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, Freedom of Religion in America, updates the founding president’s cut and paste Bible version and renews his call for religious freedom and separation of church and state.

Huening hosted Spiritual Choices, a local TV program interviewing local and national spiritual leaders with disparate points of view. Tom last wrote about a renegade priest in The Quintessential Good Samaritan, The Authorized Biography of John Joseph Kelly, Champion of Social Justice, released by Post Hill Press in 2022. 

History

Raised in a devout family of fourteen (12 children), he can’t remember missing Sunday Mass, ever. Despite the threat of eternal damnation, he had impure thoughts and did teenage boy stuff. However, he took maximum advantage of Confession to cleanse his blackened soul.

Following the (then and now) dictates of the Vatican, as young adults, Tom and his wife produced four wonderful daughters in four and one half years. Seeing the wear and tear on his wife, Tom began to question Church doctrine, especially the prohibition on birth control. The girls were all baptized and received first Holy Communion. Tom also taught other public school children their catechism.

But seeds of doubt, planted by non-Christian world travel and by multi-faith fellow Navy pilots, finally sprouted. At age thirty he walked, no ran, away from what he saw as stifling, stuck-in-the-dark-ages dogma and faulty focus on falderal.

Today, Tom acts “spiritual but not religious” and seeks alternatives to the dog-eat-dogma of competing and contrary world religion ideologies. He believes in a Supreme Force and knows he can’t prove it. He hopes you will join him on his blog in the search for peace-friendly, pluralistic pathways to a more just world.

One of twelve children, and the father of four daughters, this author was a carrier-qualified U.S. Navy fighter pilot who served in, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines and Vietnam and later became a pilot for TWA. In the political world, he was an elected member of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, serving 1987 through 1998, elected in 1998 as the San Mateo County Controller and reelected in 2002, 2006, and 2010. He is a CPA and a member of the California Bar.