Humanist Chaplain

Greg M. Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, and is author of the New York Times Bestselling book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. He sits on the executive committee of the 36-member corps Harvard Chaplains. In 2005 he received ordination as a Humanist Rabbi from theInternational Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, where he studied in Jerusalem and Michigan for five years. He holds a BA (Religion and Chinese) and an MA (Judaic Studies) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Masters of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School.

Epstein was the primary organizer of “The New Humanism,” an international conference in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Humanist Chaplaincy of Harvard University. He blogs for CNN.com, Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post, and his work as a Humanist rabbi and Chaplain has recently been been featured by ABC World News with Diane Sawyer; ABC News Network; Al Jazeera; Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and numerous other programs on National Public Radio; BBC Radio; NYTimes.com; USA Today; Newsweek; US News and World Report; The Boston Globe; The Jewish Daily Forward, The Christian Century; The Guardian, and many more. He is an adviser to two student groups at Harvard College, the Secular Society and the Interfaith Council, and to the Harvard Humanist Graduate Community. He also chairs the Advisory Board of the national umbrella organization the Secular Student Alliance, joining such renowned nonbelievers as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Greg grew up in Flushing, Queens, New York as an assimilated and disinterested Reform Jew. He studied Buddhism and Taoism while at Stuyvesant High School in New York City and in college went to Taiwan for a semester aiming to study Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in its original language and context. Finding that Eastern religions do not necessarily have greater access to truth than Western ones, he returned to the US and shifted his focus to rock music, recording and singing professionally for a year after college. Soon thereafter, he learned of the movement of Humanism and the possibility of a career as a Humanist rabbi and chaplain.

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Assistant Humanist Chaplain

Jonathan Figdor serves as the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University.  He pioneered the Humanist Chaplaincy Training Program at Harvard Divinity School when he graduated as the first Atheist Humanist MDiv in the school’s history. While many would consider the idea of an Atheist going to divinity school rather strange, for John, it was a perfectly logical decision. When he finished his B.A. in philosophy at Vassar (with honours), he decided to spend a year doing community service as an AmeriCorps VISTA at a domestic violence shelter in Butte, Montana.

John learned many things that year, but none so vividly as the lesson that most Americans do not take their ethical advice from Aristotle, Kant, or Mill, but rather from religious leaders such as Rick Warren, the late Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He realized that if he was going to make a meaningful contribution to the ethical dialogue in this country, he ought to study religious ethics in order to better articulate the dangers of faith-based ethics.

At the beginning, he prepared for a long, hard war of attrition against the Christian establishment at HDS and expected his classmates to be wildly conservative religious ideologues hell-bent (mind the pun) on imposing their religious ethics on all people. After all, he was intent on winning them over to the truth of reason and atheism. However, during his first semester at HDS, he had the fortune of taking a class with Jim Wallis, a prominent and famously liberal Evangelical minister. While Jim and John were theological opposites, John found that their moral compasses were quite similar. John recognized that the two shared a set of beliefs: 1) that scientific methods should be used to solve humanity’s problems; 2) that the concerns of this world (poverty, racism, sexism, etc.) should take precedence over the concerns about the afterlife; and 3) that all people have inherent dignity and should be treated as ends, not as means.

John began to understand that he and Jim shared a core belief in Humanist principles. While Jim Wallis’s Humanism is deeply influenced by his Christian faith, unlike John’s purely atheistic Humanism, they found that they agreed on issue after issue because of their shared Humanist convictions. Humanism formed a sort of bridge between their vastly different world views. As a result, John believes that Humanism has the ability to transcend religious differences and bring disparate religious and irreligious voices into fruitful and productive dialogue.

John was hired as the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University in July of 2010. He looks forward to an exciting year of helping to develop and sustain the Humanist community at Harvard and particularly to working with students organizing social, community service, and atheist/Humanist activism events. John will use his contacts with secular activists from the Secular Student Alliance (of which he is a board member) to bring young, atheist and Humanist activists and thinkers to campus to share their ideas with the Humanist undergrads and grads. John’s current research interests are in applied ethics and biomedical ethics, particularly at the intersection of the problems of free will, determinism, and personal responsibility.

Campus Organizer and Director of Outreach

Sarah Chandonnet is the Campus Organizer and Director of Outreach at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard.

A graduate of Harvard Divinity School in 2009, she holds an MTS in Religion, Literature, and Culture. While at Harvard, she served as the editor-in-chief of Culture: The Harvard Divinity Graduate Journal of Religion, as well as the vice president of the Harvard Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists (HASH). She also holds a BA (English) from Boston University, where she studied under Elie Wiesel. Sarah’s academic interests include 19th and 20th century American literature, and Judeo-Christian textual influences. She has written for Boston University’s Daily Free Press and The Journal of the Core Curriculum, as well as Harvard Divinity School’s The Wick, and the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Network News.

Sarah grew up in Lowell, MA, and she attended Ste. Jeanne d’Arc School, where she began her early Biblical studies, and Lowell High School. She has worked with a variety of non-profit organizations, including the American Red Cross and Rebuilding Together — Lowell where she sits on the board.

Since starting at the Humanist Chaplaincy in the Fall of 2009, Sarah has been involved with much of the programming, most notably the Spring Break Service Trip to New Orleans, where she helped lead a group of Harvard graduate students in a week of service and rebuilding.

Interfaith and Community Service Fellow

Christopher D. Stedman is the Interfaith and Community Service Fellow at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard.