Eugene Thomas Long (March 16, 1935 – March 13, 2020) was born in Richmond, Virginia. He was the author of Jaspers and Bultmann: A Dialogue Between Philosophy and Theology (1968), Existence, Being and God: An Introduction to the Philosophical Theology of John Macquarrie (1985) and Twentieth Century Western Philosophy of Religion:1900-2000 (2000).
He was a Professor of Philosophy at Randolph Macon College between 1964 and 1970. He was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina between 1970 and 2002. During that time he was Chair of the Department of Philosophy (1972-1987). He retired in 2002 as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.
The major focus of Long’s work is the dialogue between philosophy and theology and he is often characterized both as a philosophical theologian and philosopher of religion. Attracted in his early days to the work of Hegel and British and American Idealism, he is influenced in particular by the work of Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Paul Tillich and John Macquarrie. Appealing to the theories of experience in the tradition of so-called radical empiricism, Long argues for transcendent dimensions of general human experience to bridge the gap between specifically religious and ordinary experience.