Hi everyone, this is Britt and Bill back with another episode and today we are so excited.

This is my favorite content creator that I found, an author that I've found in the past year,

and I hype up her work wherever I can.

We are meeting today with Liz Bukar. She's a religious ethicist and professor of religion at Northeastern University, certified yoga instructor.

Her popular writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and she's the author of four books, including the award-winning Stealing My Religion, which has really changed some of my views quite a bit. And the reason that I wanted to have her on

is twofold. First, her substacks have been going very viral lately, and she's growing on social

media as a trusted voice in religious and spiritual commentary. But also personally, when people

have asked me what I would have done differently in writing my last book.

The number one thing that I say is that I wish I would have found Liz's work sooner

and done a chapter or at least a section on how to steal from religion more ethically,

which I have been learning from Liz.

And so I'm really excited to have

her on. So Liz, thanks for being here. And if you don't mind, just kind of tell us some of your

story and how you got into studying religion. Okay. So thanks so much, Britt. I mean, you're such

a great, like, promoter of other people's work on social media. You're so generous with your sort of shout out to your

large audience about my work so i really appreciate you and our sort of budding online friendship

in the last year okay so how did i get here it's a little bit my mistake um so i like i am like my

day job as professor of religion i didn't study religion at all as an undergrad, didn't take a single course. But after college, I moved to D.C. and started doing social justice work. And a lot of that overlapped with my expertise at that time in South America and Latin America. I lived in Brazil for a couple years. I was really interested in social justice work there. And the Catholic Church is a big, like a big player. So I think I first came to my interest of religion

sort of through that social justice lens where I was like, okay, this is like something that has to be

engaged. And I did work in D.C. and I ended up at a group called Catholics for Choice,

which is actually a pro-choice, pro-access to contraception Catholic organization. And I, and that kind of, that job kind of blew my mind a little bit, I think. I mean, I'm baptized Catholic, but I was not raised in the Catholic Church. I was raised in a congregationalist church. My dad was Catholic. He used to joke that the congregation is sort of like the social club of Protestants.

But I was raised in a congregation of church until sort of middle school when I no longer sort of accepted that sort of identity for myself.

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