I work as a board-certified chaplain at MarinHealth Medical Center in Greenbrae, California. Most of my work is with people facing serious illness, and with the families and staff around them — after a diagnosis, during a long decline, in the hours after a death, and in the ordinary stretches of illness that are harder than anyone admits.

I came to chaplaincy from the academic study of religion. I earned a PhD in religious studies at Brown and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts before training clinically at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, McLean Hospital, and UCSF. I am endorsed by the Religious Naturalist Association and the Humanist Society, which is to say I practice without a religious tradition of my own, and without needing one from the people I sit with.

My approach is pluralistic and relational. I use structured spiritual assessment, and I draw on the American pragmatist tradition — William James, John Dewey — for an account of meaning that doesn’t depend on the supernatural. In a room it mostly amounts to listening, and taking seriously whatever the person in front of me takes seriously.