Ep #12 - Vanessa Gomez-Brake

You’ll love this conversation with Vanesa Gomez Brake, the Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California. Vanessa’s amazing because she is the first Humanist Chaplain to be a Dean of Religious Life in any American University.

In her role, she works to support and promote university religious and spiritual life, serving the spiritual needs of all students regardless of their religious perspective.

Vanessa’s fascinating because even though she became nonreligious in her teens, she studied religion at university and got a Master of Divinity degree - meaning she has spent years studying religion and religious identity as a sort of outsider. She’s thought about how all people can benefit from religious and spiritual practices, even if they don’t have religious beliefs.

We spoke to her because she is an expert in understanding how spiritual practices can be adapted for everyone, and she also knows how to do that within an organisation.   

What will you get from it?

• You’ll learn what what it means to be a chaplain in a secular and inclusive way, and what being a chaplain is actually is.

• You’ll be introduced to the idea of ‘stealth chaplaincy’. ‘Stealth chaplains’ aren’t vigilantes but Vanessa uses this term to describe how companies in Silicon Valley, now have the chaplain role but without the word.

• You’ll also really appreciate how Vanessa defines a ‘spiritual life’ - in a way that makes sense for religious and non-religious alike.

• She then digs into what that looks like on a university campus in a way that will be really useful for anyone in any type of organisation, school or community.