New from Thomas Bachhuber, Ed.D.
The Next Stop
Aging◆Faith◆Forevermore
How love connects the here and now with the hereafter.
We spend a lifetime learning how to leave one room and enter the next. This is the last doorway, and love is what carries through.
The book
Five books about career and the working life came first. They helped readers answer the question, for what are we living? This one asks the question sitting underneath all of them: what are we living toward?
For more than four decades, Tom sat with people at the crossroads of career, ministry, and retirement. The same question kept surfacing near the end of every conversation, usually quietly, usually last: what happens to the people we love, and to us, when this life ends?
The Next Stop is his answer. It began with a phrase from Thomas Aquinas, contemplata aliis tradere, “to hand down to others the fruits of contemplation,” and grew into a series of essays that move between theology, science, and memory, drawing on Biblical writers, Jesus, Aquinas, Augustine, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and C.S. Lewis among others, alongside contemporary voices like Joyce Rupp, Barbara Crafton, Mary Oliver, and Parker Palmer.
Running through all of it is one idea: that love is the thread connecting what awaits us in the forevermore to what we’re already living, here, now. It is written for readers far enough along the road to have started wondering — including those reflecting on their own mortality, those facing or nearing the end of life, and the people who walk with them: adult children, caregivers, nurses, and hospice workers.
The author
A counselor by training, a companion by practice. Twenty years of life/work/faith retreats taught him where the real questions live.
Wauconda, Illinois
Dr. Thomas Bachhuber is a retired university and corporate executive and the author of five books. For more than two decades he has helped adults navigate pivotal life transitions with clarity, purpose, and spiritual grounding.
He co-founded and directed the Center for Life Transitions, first in Bridgewater, New Jersey, later in Milwaukee and the Chicago area, where he and his team paired career counseling with spiritual formation for adults in transition. Its LifeSHIFT: Work & the Christian Journey retreat traveled to Christian retreat centers around the country for two decades.
Earlier in his career, Tom directed the career centers at Coe College, the University of Maryland-College Park, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and held an adjunct faculty position in educational psychology. As senior vice president for National Corporate College Consultants, he built recruitment strategy and training for Merck, Pfizer, Abbott Laboratories, Deloitte, Kraft, PepsiCo, and Goldman Sachs. His doctorate and master’s in counseling are from the University of Virginia; his B.A. is from Ripon College.
Today he serves his parish as lay worship leader, reflector, and Eucharistic minister, heads its nursing home ministry, and was a longtime student and board member of KAIROS: School of Spiritual Formation at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Wernersville, Pennsylvania.
Praise
What early readers are saying about The Next Stop.
“Your conversational style works. It takes the edge off a profound subject and keeps the theological and philosophical thought and quotes from feeling heavy.”
“I thoroughly enjoyed how you wove others’ views with your own. Very conversational style, it makes potentially difficult concepts easy to grasp.”
“You have a good concept, and people are interested in this topic. You have some affecting moments in the manuscript, when you relate the death of your child, and other personal stories. Readers tend to like that sort of thing.”
“It really touched me. I love the way you handle the challenges we go through as we approach our age, and the variety of writers who lend their words to being positive and grateful for life in general.”
“You do a great job of continuously referring to the thread of energy and love that unites the content of your book.”
Earlier books
Six books, written across a working life about working lives.
Notes
Written when something is worth writing down. No schedule.
Letters
A letter, now and then.
No schedule and no noise. When there is something worth sending, it arrives. Leave your name and it will find you.