Jeff Chu

Jeff Chu is a journalist, essayist, preacher, and speaker. He serves as an editor-at-large at Travel+Leisure magazine, teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in Cary, N.C., and parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, Calif. Over his eclectic journalistic career, Jeff Chu has interviewed presidents and paupers, corporate execs and preachers, Britney Spears and Ben Kingsley. As a writer and editor for Time, Conde Nast Portfolio, and Fast Company, he has compiled a portfolio that includes stories on megahit-making Swedish songwriters (a piece for which he went clubbing in Stockholm); James Bond (for which he stood on a Spanish beach and watched Halle Berry emerge from the waves over and over and over); undercover missionaries in the Arab world (he traveled to North Africa and went to church); and the decline of Christianity in Europe (he prayed). On the wall of his New York office, you'll find a quote from former Senator John Warner, who once told Jeff: "You're a good little interviewer!" A California native, Jeff went to high school at Miami's Westminster Christian, where he sat behind Alex Rodriguez in Mr. Warner's world history class. A graduate of Princeton, the London School of Economics, and Princeton Theological Seminary, Jeff has received fellowships from the International Reporting Project and the French-American Foundation, and in 2012, was part of the Seminar on Debates in Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School. The nephew and grandson of Baptist preachers, he is an ordained minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. He loves fried rice and the Book of Ecclesiastes and detests marzipan more than he can explain in words. He, his husband, and their old, deaf dog, Fozzie, live in Grand Rapids, Michigan.