How to Humanist

Someone reached out to our team not long ago and asked a question that a lot of people are probably carrying around: when you stop believing, where does the magic go? Faith Litchfield, content creator and professional lover of people, is basically a living answer to that question. Her entire existence is proof that wonder, whimsy, and the deep conviction that life is genuinely special do not requi...

Reverend Dr. Je' Exodus Hooper is an arts and cultural community curator, clergy leader, and scholar, but none of those words will prepare you for what it actually feels like to be in conversation with them. Je' moves through ideas the way a painter moves through color, layering meaning on top of meaning until you realize you've been seeing the world in a shade you didn't have a name for before. F...

Jack Harrison-Quintana has spent his career doing work that has shaped LGBTQ lives in corners of the world most advocates never get to reach. He has shown up, in person, in over 76 countries, building real relationships with LGBTQ activists on the ground, helping communities collect their own data on discrimination when their governments wouldn't, and working to make sure that the most vulnerable...

As the founder of Yesterqueers, Amanda W. Timpson is doing the work of restoring what got left out of queer history, correcting narratives that were shaped by white supremacy and patriarchy, and sharing it in an accessible and entertaining way. This conversation goes beyond Stonewall and the names we think we already know. Amanda makes a case that history belongs to all of us. The diary you're not...

Shane Lukas runs an award-winning design agency, has a TEDx Talk dropping, and owns a record collection that is genuinely not fair. He also does respite foster care with his partner in North Carolina -- meaning when a kid comes into the system with nowhere to go, sometimes they land at Shane's house. It's a commitment, it's not always easy, and he's not here to make it sound like it is. What this...

Shay has been known to keep her cool in interviews... until now. But it's Cain Culto, so... fair. Cain's music and striking visual artistry has been breaking people's brains since from the beginning, even while working at Sprouts and finding ways to build professional-grade visuals from scratch. He is, as Shay's sister Seren put it, a piece of art on two feet. Get ready for one of the most inspiri...

Shay has a bestie. Her bestie is a Christian named Cheryl. They have been besties since May 19th, 2009, and neither of them has tried to convert the other once. And yet they've both survived. It's a miracle. This episode is for everyone who has ever wondered whether an interfaith friendship can actually work, or whether you have to choose between your beliefs and the people you love. You don't . A...

On our first international episide, we visit Bergen to talk to Christian Lomsdalen -- the president of the Norwegian Humanist Association, a high school teacher, a religious studies scientist at the University of Bergen, and a person who has gods tattooed on his back. Apparently this is completely normal in Norway. So is a state-funded humanist organization with 180,000 members, a confirmation cer...

Dr. Monica Johnson is a licensed clinical psychologist, a self-proclaimed Swiss Army knife of a human being, and someone who will absolutely bring up DMX at exactly the right moment in a conversation about allyship. That's ok -- if you've been listening, you'll already know that Shay was ready with her jukebox trigger. "Flesh of my FLESH!", and all that. Anyway... This is one of those episodes whe...

Turns out you can have the chuppah, break the glass, do the hora, and still not have to mention God once. Or you can mention God exactly once, specifically for grandma, and everyone goes home happy. Humanist celebrant Bethel Nathan has been building ceremonies around real people and real love for 17 years, and her secret weapon is a questionnaire, a puzzle metaphor, and the radical idea that tradi...

Salem, Massachusetts. Austin, Texas. Kingston, Pennsylvania. Turns out if you know where to look, Satanists have been quietly securing the best real estate in America for decades. In this episode, Shay sits down with Taylor Leigh of The Antibot, a Satanist-humanist and former evangelical missionary kid who grew up in Indonesia, came back to the States, and somehow ended up with a pentagram necklac...

A man chose Liberty University over the University of Toronto because it had a conversion therapy program. That man is now a postdoctoral fellow editing anthologies about surviving it. You really cannot make this stuff up, and Dr. Lucas Wilson does not have to. In this episode he and Shay talk evangelical fictions, weaponized women, the anti-trans argument and why it falls apart the second someone...

Shay & Devin decide to talk about the big D... Death. Together they cover grief that doesn't end, rituals humanists have yet to invent, what it means to chaplain someone on death row, and why America is, to put it diplomatically, absolutely cooked when it comes to dealing with mortality. But here's the thing about death: it will humble you, it will sit in your stomach like a brick, and at some...

Alyssa Grenfell grew up knowing three things: coffee was basically heroin, God had a very specific plan for her life, and that plan included Italy. Denver... same difference. In this episode, Alyssa and Shay get into what it actually costs to leave the Mormon church: the wrong husband God recommended, the sister who didn't spontaneously combust when she accidentally drank coffee, and where exactly...

For years, Shawn Towers ate the mustard. Didn't ask them to take it back, didn't make a fuss, just swallowed it because that's what a good Christian man did. Turns out that burger was a metaphor for every indignity he'd been quietly absorbing in the name of forgiveness, righteousness, and not going to hell. Shawn is a former devout believer, a father, and a man who has done enough work on himself...

A Jesuit priest called Joe Gerstein lazy in 1989 and accidentally launched a global sobriety movement in 38 countries and 16 languages. Joe is a retired Harvard Medical School professor, a man who can't quite pronounce the thing he invented, a mango gardener in Miami, and the person responsible for sobering up the entire Scottish prison system — none of which was the plan. Also there were toes. Di...

When Charlie Kirk died, Shay had feelings about her feelings. Specifically, the feeling that humanism was standing in the driveway blocking the parade float. That spiral led us straight to Elisa Rosoff — a humanist chaplain who spends her days inside the place we send the people we've decided are bad, asking the one question nobody outside those walls wants to sit with: what actually makes somebod...

Hear us out... what if Allah was an aspiring hairdresser who flunked out of beauty school, and rather than dealing with that loss in therapy like a normal god, he spent the next 1,400 years making women cover their hair? We're not saying it's confirmed. We're just saying it explains a lot. Enter Sammy of Haram Doodles, who was told as a child that drawing living beings was sinful — so she threw ou...

After a stranger suggests that maybe two plus two equals five in another universe, Robert Affinis decides he is officially done debating God’s existence with anyone. Ever. From telling Mormons “no thank you” with full chest to growing up in a deeply religious Black household that still made room for questions, Robert and Shay get into what it actually takes to say “I’m a humanist” out loud. They u...

What if the secret origin story of humanism is just... ancient people getting tired of handing over their goats? In this episode, Greg Epstein — Harvard and MIT's Humanist Chaplain and author of the NY Times bestseller Good Without God — joins us to break down what humanism actually is, where it came from, and why humans have been quietly side-eyeing authority since long before anyone had a podcas...

In this debut episode of How to Humanist , Shay Leonia introduces herself as the mildly terrified new podcast host representing a nearly century-old institution, the American Humanist Association, admits she had no clue who Thomas Paine was, and unpacks how growing up with a radically hospitable mother shaped her understanding of empathy long before she had language for it. It’s a funny, tender re...