SHAY: Episode five, and it's Shay Leonia — How to Humanist. Welcome. So glad that you're here.
I really don't know how I'm going to start opening up these podcast intros, but we're just free-falling for now. I'm coming off of a weekend of supporting — well, not really supporting Fish as much as I was just filming him like a creep for social media content — but Fish was in town.

So I just want to thank the Philly Ethical Society and BuxMont UU, with Reverend Kevin Jagoe, who welcomed Fish. This was my first time at a UU church, by the way. I just felt very welcomed, and I tried to not be in anybody's way while I was walking around with my tripod, but I think we did well. I'm excited for Fish to come back and talk to more and more humanists in Philly and around the country.

Today's episode is going to be really interesting. This is probably one of the first concepts we had as we were planning this podcast.

But before we get to that, I want to recognize another one of our comments and reviews. This one is being censored right now on the platform it was left on, so I'm going to go ahead and read it.
It's from Broccoli, commenting on episode four, "Allah Flunked Out of Beauty School." Broccoli says:
(singing) choppin’ broccoli.

“Really, the thing with the hair is so bizarre. It's a Christian Bible thing too. I'm pretty sure it's implied at one point that women need to cover their hair so as not to tempt the angels and have them want to come down and make more Nephilim babies — like before the flood, because that corrupted the world enough that God wanted to reset. So I guess cover your hair so that the angels don't grape you, and then God wipes out humanity in a fit of victim blaming."

Wow. Broccoli. Just so you know, I'm excited to read your comments on the show.
Nephilim. Nephilim. I'm going to have to get used to that word. Okay.

Please continue to leave reviews on whatever platform you're listening to. We really want to get this podcast and this information out to as many people as possible. So feel free to share an episode, and leave us your feedback in the comments and in reviews.

For today's comments, I actually have a specific request. This is such a nuanced question — whether or not bad people are a thing. Like, do bad people exist? And you'll find that even within this one episode I had two different speakers on — Fish Stark and then Elisa Rosoff, who is a chaplain that works within the prison system — and they had in a lot of ways a very similar answer, but in many ways a very different answer.

So I want to hear from you. What do you feel on the matter? Like, how did you react when you heard that some bad person was no longer with us? I don't know how to put it politely, but anyway, I'm not good with polite.

So I just want to get into this episode. First you're going to hear from Fish, because I actually spoke to Fish before we got Elisa on, so you're hearing it in proper chronological order.

Then for Elisa's segment, I want to make sure that you hear — by the end — a question I ask her about anything she wants people to know more about. She mentioned the Second Look Act that's happening in North Carolina. This is something that we want to support, and I hope you stay tuned to hear more about it. I will put some more information in the show notes. I really hope you enjoy today's episode.
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FISH: I mean, I'm curious — what are the questions that are coming up from you? How do you think about this question, Shay?

SHAY: I'm having a really hard time with it. I do live in the gray of — yes, there are people that are incarcerated that shouldn't be. There are people that have just done misdemeanors, or the three strikes — what was that law that Bill Clinton —

FISH: Three Strikes Law. Yep.

SHAY: Yes. The Three Strikes Law. So granted, not every person that's in jail is this like serial murderer, horrible Charles Manson type of person. But then again, for me — there are people there that have committed horrible crimes, done horrible things to even children. It's hard for me to see them as human with having human rights, but then also I'm so much the kind of person that's like, I want them to stew in what they did and not live this redeemable life. In a way, if it's been determined that what they did was so horrific that they are going to spend the rest of their life in jail, it's hard. It's really hard to grapple with.

FISH: I think the bigger question here is how does humanism think about evil? Because there's evil in the world — always has been, will be. And in religion there's a really easy answer about evil. Here's the source it comes from. It's sometimes deeply embedded in people, and here's how we punish it.

SHAY: Yeah.

FISH: And part of what humanists are reacting to is the fact that religion has so often labeled things as evil that aren't. Seeking knowledge is evil. Wanting to use your body in a certain way, to love who you love — that's evil. Things like knowledge and love and freedom, when they're cast as evil and cast as sins, it kind of problematizes the concept of evil for anybody.

Humanism believes that there are many different ways to live life, but that doesn't mean humanism is relativistic. There's good and bad. It's bad to harm people. It's bad to be selfish. Those are things that are just wrong to do because they don't sustain the human community. So as a humanist, do I have to believe that there can't be bad people? I don't buy into that. I think there are bad people in the world.

SHAY: Okay. Whew. That's a relief.

FISH: Here's the distinction though. I think that people don't have fixed natures. You're not inherently anything. Your brain chemistry might be different, you might have a certain personality, different abilities — but no one has an inherent essence of good or evil in them.

Whether it's out of selfishness, fear, desperation, or whatever — people do bad things. And sometimes someone does bad things to an extent where we have to separate them from everyone else to protect everyone else. I've talked to really thoughtful humanists who are full anti-incarceration — like, no jail, everything solved through other means.

SHAY: Whoa.

FISH: That is not me. The abolition movement is thoughtful in responding to a real problem in this country. I don't think you have to be a full-on prison abolitionist to be a humanist. As you say, I think there are a lot of people who are in jail on trumped-up bullshit drug charges that shouldn't be.

But I think the way humanism asks us to think about people who have done evil — number one is to recognize it, name it, own it. We shouldn't be afraid, just because we have this optimistic belief about people. Part of the reason humanity has kept growing is because we've had systems of accountability.
People aren't naturally good, in the same way that they're not naturally evil. We become good because we have to take care of the people around us, and sometimes we need nudges — social contracts. We need the loving and sometimes direct guidance of our friends, our family, our coworkers, to do the right thing.

Morality isn't something that exists magically in the air and some people breathe it in and some people don't. Morality comes from the people in our lives showing us how to be and demanding the best from us. And that means, actually, part of the way that people on balance are often good is that we feel a sense of accountability to each other.

So I think we can't not name when people are doing bad things. What we can hold in the other hand is a sense that anybody can change. That doesn't mean there aren't some people who just shouldn't be let out of prison because of the severity of what they did, or the likelihood that they can't really get over whatever demons they're fighting. I think that's very, very few people, but they exist.

But when we're thinking about interpersonal conflict — a friend or a family member or someone who has done something that really hurt us — there's nothing about that person that is locked in forever as evil. Everyone has the ability to change their story through the choices they make. And so part of what we want to do as people, and as a society, is figure out how we guide people through that transformation of becoming better.

SHAY: I definitely was somebody who — even beyond the prison system — initially, I guess out of habit, but I want to take ownership over it: I was celebratory when I learned that Charlie Kirk was gone. I'm somebody that delights every time I see a joke made about him being gone. And I keep asking myself, after I have that initial relief of, okay, well at least there's one schmuck that's gone — I always go back to, oh wait, I'm a humanist now. This doesn't feel very humanist of me. But I don't even know — is it humanist of me to still have those feelings?

FISH: I think ultimately what I hear you describing is a visceral response to the fact that this guy caused all this pain in the world, and you're glad that the source of that pain is removed.

SHAY: Correct.

FISH: To be clear, you're not a person who wishes death on people.

SHAY: Definitely not.

FISH: I don't want to tell anyone else how to think about it. My feeling is I'm not happy Charlie Kirk is dead because I don't think we should have a country that deals with bad people by killing them. I don't support the death penalty. And I think Charlie Kirk was a bad dude. But I don't think we should kill people for being bad, because once you set that precedent, then whoever is in charge gets to decide who the bad people are. And we're seeing that play out.

SHAY: Yes. And I agree with that too.

FISH: And so that to me is how I contextualize it. Okay, this is why, even though I think the things this person did and said were really harmful to so many people that I love and care about, I still wanted him alive. Because I want that for every person.

But I also think — and one of the things I think is different between humanism and a lot of traditional religion is that religions kind of problematize feelings. You feel this way and it's a problem. It's bad. You're not supposed to feel that way. It's a sinful thought.

Humanism is a lot more agnostic about thoughts. Whatever's in your head, that's fine. What matters is what we do. Are we contributing to a culture of violence in the world, or are we contributing to a culture of peace and humanization? I think we all have those moments of schadenfreude.
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[SHAY interjects: Well, well, well — we're on episode five now. For those of you who have listened to the previous episodes, you will probably have already anticipated that I was going to cut in here and say that I didn't know what the word schadenfreude meant. But guess what? Yours truly is a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. And guess what she did for her musical final. Avenue Q. Making me feel glad that I'm not you.]
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FISH: Like when we see something happen to a person we think did a lot of harm, we're like — finally. And I think that's something to interrogate, because I think it leads us to good answers. But I also think it's okay for that to be something that comes up for us. And again, what matters is what we do with it.
SHAY: So for any humanists out there saying good riddance — are they any less humanist for thinking that? Or do you feel like they have an opportunity to reexamine?

FISH: I think, let me put it this way — in the same way a Christian would say we're all sinners, none of us are perfect humanists. We all have our moments of being self-indulgent, cutting corners. Nobody is perfect at living their values all the time, because that's really the point. The point is to struggle through it and get a little bit better all the time.

So let me put it this way. I don't think it's humanist to celebrate the death of somebody, even if they did bad things. I don't think that is a humanist action or a humanist belief. Now, you might say it's probably not humanist to eat meat, because of the environmental impacts or because of factory farming. But I do it.

SHAY: I don't, for the record.

FISH: That's fair. And vegetarians are overrepresented in humanism. I recognize that it's probably the more moral position to not eat meat, but it's a weakness that I have. I think humanism recognizes that we are fallible people, and to live and be good in the world is not to do good every minute of every day.

Do the best we can. And if that person is doing the best they can, and is reacting in a more visceral way than I would, to the specific things Charlie Kirk said about groups they might be a part of that I'm not a part of — I'm not going to sit over here policing how individual people react to the death of someone who I think caused many deaths throughout his life through the way that he mongered hate.

But I think we have to be — as a movement — committed to this idea that everyone deserves life because they are human. We can't be cavalier about violence, because when we start accepting the idea that redemptive violence can get us to the world we want — which is a concept that has been embedded in our society because of religious myth — then we end up really devaluing humanity under our own subjective morality or political views.

SHAY: Okay, cool. I feel like that will clear up a lot of things for people who are new to humanism and think that every single day is like the opening scene of the Mary Tyler Moore Show where she throws her hat up in the air and everything is wonderful.

Have you ever had to battle with any visceral reactions like what I was describing with Charlie Kirk?
FISH: Oh, God. Yeah. All the time. I did it when Kirk passed — in my own head I had a lot of conflicting feelings about it. I've got a finely honed sense of jealousy. I can hold a grudge. And these are just things I know are weaknesses for me.

One of the things I like about working in humanism is that it kind of pushes me to challenge those parts of myself that I'm not the proudest of. And it has pushed me to be able to separate — a little bit — the way this person is behaving right now from their innate humanity, and the fact that they have value outside of their behavior, which I find frustrating and useless, if we're being real about things.

There's nothing about humanism that says we have to be sunshine and rainbows towards everybody all the time. And if you look at the history of humanism, you've got people who made their living through rigorous combat with sources of unjust power.

I think about A. Philip Randolph, who was one of the biggest organizers of the Black labor movement and then planned the March on Washington. He said something I love: justice is never given, it is exacted. Sometimes we have to be oppositional in order to fight for a higher ideal.

The thing about humanism is it's not a lot of hard lines — yes and no, this is a sin, heaven or hell. There's a lot of nuance, because humanity is nuanced and the world is nuanced. And one of the hardest nuances to hold is that sometimes there are people working for bad things in the world that we have to directly oppose.

How do we oppose them really strongly, forcefully, with all of the energy that fighting for our values requires — without degrading our understanding of their basic humanity, their right to live, their right to be safe, their right to speak their mind? That's a hard contradiction to hold. We have to fight these people like hell if we want to win a better world. And also, there's not actually going to be a better world if we embrace their dehumanizing tactics in the fight.

But that's where Randolph, and Steinem, and Frederick Douglass, and so many humanists who have led the way in civil rights and abolition movements have shown us — yeah, actually you can balance that fire and that anger at injustice with respecting not necessarily the ideas or the positions or the actions, but the basic humanity of the opponent.

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FISH: I'm Fish Stark, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association.

AMITAI: And I'm Amitai Heller, Legal Director of the AHA's Legal Center.

FISH: Right now, religious freedoms are under attack — and that includes the ability to not believe. And when those rights are violated, we're here to fight for you.

Your boss says the only way to get promoted is by joining his Bible study group? Well, we'll walk into his office with a ten-foot Constitution and slam it down on his desk. We don't actually have a giant Constitution, but yeah, that is probably a violation of your rights.

Or your kid's coach says no pray, no play? We will show up in matching tracksuits and coach the team ourselves. We don't do that. What we do is defend the rights of students in court.

And if a judge tells you to read the Bible as part of your sentence, we will storm into that courtroom with a choir singing "We Will Rock You." Still no choir. But yeah, that's probably unconstitutional, and that is exactly why we're here.

AMITAI: None of those are real numbers. Please just go to americanhumanist.org/legal and submit your case. We're here to protect your rights.
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ELISA: In my work as a corrections chaplain, I work with a majority of care recipients who have been labeled as offenders. They are othered as people who have offended and done something wrong per society's understanding of good and bad behavior.

And in getting to know those people, I have a deeper understanding of the difference between a good or bad person and a good or bad behavior. In one second, somebody's whole life can change because of a pulled trigger, for example. We don't know the context. We don't know what happened before. A lot of what we see in the media has to do with a split second of somebody's life, and we're left to imagine what the rest of the story is. And when we're left to our own devices for survival reasons, we tend to want to protect ourselves, isolate, imagine the worst.

So I don't necessarily think of the world as good and bad people, but rather actions people take that could have caused harm to others. And harm, from my perspective, is not what we're striving for. So it's complicated. But I'm able to work with people who have done pretty heinous things because I can meet them where they're at in that moment and not allow why they're in prison to tint or shade how I'm engaging with them right then and there.

SHAY: How did you even decide to use this skillset for corrections? What brought you there?

ELISA: I was a preschool teacher. But my grandfather was an Episcopal priest and he went to Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and it's there that he met my grandmother — so I wouldn't be here today if it hadn't been for that meeting at seminary in the sixties.

He was a really important figure in my life. I think what you'd call a renaissance man. Somebody who loved opera, was a sculptor, loved the ballet, was also your stereotypical macho man with a chainsaw building cabins. Loved nature. Was a very liberal priest at the time, considering what traditional was. He married gay couples. He brought grape juice to communion — when that was unheard of — because he knew people in his congregation were in recovery from alcohol use disorder.

So he was an inspiration. I was facing a quarter-life crisis and decided to go back to school, get a master of divinity in psychology and religion. As part of that program, I needed to take what's called a unit of clinical pastoral education. I ended up getting into a program that had a prison and prison reentry sector, and I was arbitrarily assigned to a reentry program in East Harlem. My job was to be the chaplain intern for the summer.

I had never really heard of chaplaincy, so I was like — okay, so it's a job where I get to make space for people's stories, put judgment on a shelf, show up with compassion. And that's a job. I fell in love with it.
I just sat there and observed, and people came to me. I looked so out of place as this really young, scrawny white woman in Harlem with all these guys who had come out of Rikers with gang affiliations — big and strong and tough. But I had just begun tattooing my arms and I have sleeves of cherry trees, and that was a good icebreaker. Once people started talking with me about my tats, I was able to broach some more difficult topics — asking them about what brought them to the center, et cetera.

From there, I ended up doing five more units of clinical pastoral education — hospitals, big parish-based programs. And when it was time to get a full-time job after my chaplaincy residency at Duke Hospital, there was this needle-in-a-haystack position in North Carolina to work for a nonprofit specializing in funding a community chaplain for the big prison in Raleigh, and being a reentry chaplain for women in transitional houses.

I was just making it up as I went along. Prison chaplaincy itself is a very old field, but reentry chaplaincy is pretty new. There isn't a lot of funding. There are a lot of volunteers who do it, but to do it as a paying job is rare. I was pretty lucky, to be honest.

Now I'm the chaplaincy training and education coordinator for the Department of Adult Correction, but that took a lot of random luck and connections and being in the right place at the right time. And I think being a humanist chaplain has added diversity that is actually wanted in this department.

That's how I fell into it — inspired by an Episcopal priest. I'm also Jewish ethnically, and growing up I didn't have any religion imposed upon me. It was just study, learn, be exposed. And that's how I fell in love with people in general.

SHAY: I'm so impressed by your story. Correct me if I misunderstood — you were saying that there's a massive gap in chaplaincy for reentry, or just for humanist representation?

ELISA: Both. I'm the first humanist to work in the prison setting in North Carolina as a chaplain. And reentry chaplains rarely exist in a paid, professional capacity. They might be a full-time pastor at a church and volunteer for an organization, but unless you're in a very big, progressive city like New York, LA, or Portland, you're probably not going to find organizations that allocate funding to a chaplain who is going to full-time work with people reentering society after incarceration.

SHAY: Did the compassion side of this come easily to you, or was it something you had to work at?

ELISA: I think a lot of my ability to be in the same space with people who are very different from me and still feel comfortable stems from my childhood — growing up in a Montessori environment, in a liberal pocket of the Bible Belt, with people whose parents came from around the world to pursue work in an area known for its tech and hospitals. So I was just exposed to a lot of diversity, a lot of different languages and clothing styles and foods and ways of talking, and that was normalized for me.

And so when it came to being an adult and listening to someone espousing a belief that I don't share, I was able to suspend my gut reaction in order to hear them. And that's crucial in chaplaincy, because it's not about winning them over or proselytizing. I might really disagree with what they're saying. My role in that moment as a chaplain is to mirror back what I'm hearing and provide gentle scaffolding toward guiding them toward their desired outcome — not to totally step in and change their trajectory.

And that's where humanist chaplaincy is very different from, say, a humanist who's an activist in the community, because part of our ethics is that we don't try to change people's opinions, even if they're unethical. And that can be really hard. It's not for everybody.

SHAY: Is it appropriate to ask you to walk through a scenario of you in action, even if you have to make one up?

ELISA: Sure. One scenario that really bothered me was in the hospital setting, actually. I was working on one unit with somebody who had just undergone gender-affirming surgery and was really working through that with me. And then in another wing that same day, someone who was in there for routine cancer treatment was talking about the abomination of trans people and sin.

I'm thinking — how is that relevant? In that split second, in order to really be the professional chaplain in the room — I'm an ally myself — I viewed it as this person espousing all these hateful beliefs without any knowledge of the other person they're criticizing. And they're afraid of the unknown.

That's a very chaplain thing to do — to try to distill it down to the seed of the emotion, which is fear. They're in here getting cancer treatment. It's not my place to say, "That's not right what you're saying. Trans people are people too." Instead, it was about redirecting the conversation toward: you must feel out of control here in this situation. You're watching TV, you're seeing news that you don't agree with, and it just seems like society is moving at such a fast pace. Distilling it to the core issue, getting away from allowing them to run wild with commentary that's not relevant or helpful. Just taking it from there.

SHAY: Wow. I'm just in awe, because I'm very much a product of this new environment we're in with cancel culture, but also with my own experiences. I'm a survivor of domestic abuse. I'm a survivor of sexual assault. So for me to think of people who are imprisoned right now — it's very hard for me to want justice for victims while also separating that these are actions these people did. It's not always people who came out of the womb looking to harm somebody. But I also understand the consequence of letting people think they can judge other people as to who's right and who's wrong. It's so tangled for me.

ELISA: Yeah, it really is tricky. And I think what I tap into most is curiosity. If we want to choose a word for today, it would probably be curiosity, because curiosity allows me to get to know somebody and let preconceived notions melt away — or not necessarily disappear, but be on a shelf. I use that metaphor a lot because I'm not claiming to have no implicit bias or to not be disgusted by people. I'm saying that in the moment, I can put that to the side so it doesn't interfere with their ability to share with me. I want them to show up as their most authentic selves.

And I have worked in close proximity with plenty of people who have killed multiple people, sold substances that have killed others. A lot of what I've learned from hearing individual people's stories is that there's a lot of substance use disorders that go undiagnosed or untreated. There's a lot of trauma. A lot of times we see that survivors of domestic violence have a higher propensity to become involved in substance use. And then from there it's challenging to hold down a job. And then there's the need to get clothing for your kids, and then you might steal that, and then you end up going to prison for a lot of small things that then build up to a much longer sentence. But nowhere in there was there any kind of systemic change to allow a survivor to get the help they need.

So it's just really opened my eyes. Incarceration in this country — you can see clear trends divided along gender lines. And I know progressive folks are moving away from gendering, but it is important to recognize that women and men have very different experiences in prison, and different experiences that lead them to prison. That's why a lot of the grants and funding are gender-specific. That's just something for liberal progressives to keep in mind.

For example, a majority of women on the sex offender registry are people who ultimately ended up there due to substance use. And we don't see that when we just see the statistic of women who are sex offenders. We just think, oh gosh, did they do something horrific? It's much more complicated than that.
So there are lots of interesting things that the average person doesn't really contemplate when thinking about people in prison.

SHAY: What do you do once you — you mentioned putting the judgment on the shelf — do you ever go and pick it back up after you leave that environment?

ELISA: I definitely do. If something's sitting with me — now, I've been doing this for so long that I almost have a force field of protection where in the moment I'm really there, I'm really listening. And then later I couldn't tell you what those people's names were or what they were talking about.

SHAY: Wow.

ELISA: So I have very selective memory. But if something is sticking with me and I find that I'm ruminating, I will talk about it with my spouse without identifiers, or bring it up with a supervisor or a mentor, or ask other chaplains if they've experienced something similar. And I think it's so important to have peers who are experiencing the same thing, because I can't just go talk about these things to anyone and everyone. It's against policy to share some of these details too. I have to be very careful even talking with you — just keeping it vague, using examples from before I was even in the prison.

So it is an issue when it begins to impact other areas of your life. A lot of people who work in prisons drink a lot, and maybe die early as a result. I think a lot of prison staff die within ten years of retirement — that was a statistic I read somewhere, don't quote me on it, but it's a general trend. It's such a stressful scenario to be living in.
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[SHAY interjects: Don't worry, Elisa, I've got your back. A 2025 study in Criminal Justice and Behavior found that longer service time among correctional officers is linked to higher rates of persistent PTSD and depression, which are known contributors to long-term health decline and early mortality. In 2024, a review in Health and Justice summarized strong evidence of chronic stress, sleep disruption, cardiovascular risks, and substance use among correctional staff, noting that these stressors can have cumulative health effects over time, though the paper emphasized that actual mortality data is limited.]
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ELISA: Because people have to keep it so private. If you're a clerk at a grocery store, there are no confidentiality rules. You can complain all you want to everybody. But it's like finding that balance of: what can I talk about, how can I process, who's the appropriate audience to process with? All of those things help me to keep coming back to the work, because I don't internalize everything. I'm there in the moment, and then I've moved on, because it's too much.

It's too much for any one person to do three death notifications in a day. That means going to three different people, telling them a loved one died, being there to receive their grief, being there to figure out if there's going to be the possibility for a viewing of the body and all of those things. That's a lot. So if I were to get emotionally invested in each one, I couldn't do this work. And that might sound callous and cruel, but you just can't take everything within you. It's not my mother who died. I have to be there as the provider of care.

SHAY: Oh my gosh. I didn't even think about that scenario — that falls under your jurisdiction, for lack of a better word, to convey that information to them.

ELISA: Yeah. And not every single incarcerated person hears through a chaplain. Many people may hear through a phone call to a family member. However, there are quite a few people who hear through the chaplain. And that moment sticks with them for the rest of their lives. So I take that very seriously, knowing that I might not remember all the people I've informed that their mother died. They will remember that moment for the rest of their lives.

So how can I show up as the most kind, compassionate, loving, supportive presence in that moment? And be a witness to what they need to do. If they're screaming, an officer might look in and be like, everything okay? And it's yes. Screaming, crying — those things are not really common in that setting. And yet when you're with a chaplain in an office learning about a death, it's almost like the person in that moment has permission to feel. And as a chaplain, I'm going to protect that right to feel, as long as they're not causing harm to themselves or others.

SHAY: That doesn't get scary for you?

ELISA: I have not been scared in that scenario. I can't speak for other people, but I genuinely sometimes have felt more safe inside than I do outside walking on the street at night. Because there are a lot of guns out here on the streets, and I hear them, and I sometimes see them at the gas station.

Inside, the scariest things I've had to engage with are really deep emotions. And I've learned that it's okay to sit in stillness. Silence. And the person will transform before your eyes. But if you try to step in and redirect too soon, that can really impact a person long-term in how they are grieving or coping. I don't want to quiet them or shut them up. In making space, it almost naturally dissipates — if that makes sense.
SHAY: I imagine it's like waking up somebody while they're sleepwalking. How does somebody in the prison system end up with a humanist chaplain versus a Christian or Jewish chaplain?
ELISA: When you are a clinical chaplain working for the state or federal prisons, you need to have your own personal endorsement or ordination, but you have the responsibility to attend to all people in the facility. So I'm a chaplain to the 80% who are Christian, the 10% who are Muslim, the 5% who are what we call American Indian traditionalists. Everyone works with the one or two chaplains at their facility. They don't really choose who the staff chaplain is.

Now, while incarcerated, people can go through a process to have their own personal clergy approved for visitation. So in that sense, they would have their visit planned with their imam, for example. I'm not an imam, so I can't attend to certain rituals. But we're basically trained to be interfaith and to walk alongside all people, knowing a little bit about a lot of traditions.

SHAY: I feel like you've given us a great foundation to understand the type of work you're doing. I would love to circle back to the question about bad people.

ELISA: Yeah.

SHAY: I was someone who, after Charlie Kirk was shot, had an instinctual reaction of good riddance. And then immediately after that I was like, oh wait, I'm a humanist now. And that doesn't feel like a good humanist reaction. And I definitely don't want it to feel like it's okay for people to just go and assassinate people they don't agree with. I get that. But it took me a long time — almost like translating a language, figuring out what the picture is and then translating that into a humanist way of thinking. And how many consequences are behind this approach.

But I still can't help but think about certain people who are causing so much harm in the world that I just can't imagine mourning them. And I don't know how much humanism expects of us when it comes to people doing bad things.

ELISA: I'm not sure if this is my humanist nature or my chaplaincy nature responding, because it's all intertwined now. But when I hear you talking about gut reactions and feelings — no matter what you say you believe or identify as, those feelings are valid. It's not anti-humanist to have a feeling come up.
What matters as a humanist, again from my perspective, is what you then do with that feeling or what the reaction is. I too have thought many a time about that day when a certain someone's ear got shot. I can feel whatever I feel. But am I going to go kill him in the streets? No.

When I was in college in Washington, DC, Osama Bin Laden was killed. This was before I adopted the term humanist chaplain — I wasn't a professional yet. And I remember feeling really uncomfortable looking out my window and seeing all the college students popping champagne and screaming and celebrating. You had all these people partying in the streets.

So I get what you're saying — you have this conflicted feeling of relief that the hurting is going to stop, and also a discomfort about celebrating the cessation of somebody's life.

I think we all just have to be really honest and vulnerable and open and share our deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings. Because if we don't process them, they could morph into something that actually ends up harming people. So as a humanist, it's not like magically you don't have feelings anymore because you're a human. It's just that a different set of values may guide you toward taking a different action than maybe you would have taken ten years ago, when you never thought twice about ethics and values.

And I think about anyone of any identity — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — we all strive for these things. But in a moment, we might react differently from how we want to. Bad people — it's okay to want them to disappear. But yeah, it's tricky.

SHAY: So what makes somebody a bad person versus them just doing bad things?

ELISA: I don't know that I would use the term bad person, because in my studies I've gotten away from the binary of good and bad. I think that as a seminarian who did study the Bible as part of my curriculum — even though I'm not a Christian pastor — the big takeaway for me was that the gospel, the message, is all about querying the binary. We're able to recognize polar opposites, and then understand that love for one another is meant to dissolve those binaries.

So when I think about somebody deemed a bad person by society, I can want them to stop doing those bad actions. What that looks like differs from person to person. I don't believe in the death penalty. I think that for most human beings there is always the capacity for transformation. And that's a large part of why I do what I do. And if any Christian theologians are out there listening — that is also the gospel message. Transformation is always possible.

So that's a big part of how I make sense of all this. And when people need to be stopped, I don't have the authority to be the one doing that. And this comes from my clinical training — to know when to refer. As a citizen, to do my job, I can't be out in the streets picketing and shouting. I had to make that conscious choice. If I'm going to work for the government inside a prison, I can't be the one throwing blood on people on Capitol Hill. I just can't.

So we have a need for that too. You have to discern as a humanist: what's my niche, what's my area, what's my passion? I need to speak truth to power. What are we doing here? But we can't do it all as one individual.

I think the twenties — and this is just a generalization from my own lived experience — the twenties are a time where a lot of us are out in the streets, figuring out what's important to us. And then as time goes on, we choose how we're going to channel our energy so that we don't become burned out, so that we can keep waking up and keep doing the work. Yeah, you've got me going here. I could talk till the cows come home.

SHAY: No, I —

ELISA: Like always, my problem in interviews. But yeah.

SHAY: This is so helpful, because I think people — especially humanists — forget that we are not supposed to come for one another on how we are processing things. We're supposed to embody more of that compassion and non-judgment and curiosity, like you said in the beginning. And I found, even in experimenting with the concept for this episode, I was getting feedback from people who were very upset that I was not choosing a side or having any curiosity for someone like — I'll exhaust this example — like Charlie Kirk. But I think we do need to be open-minded about whether that thought, that feeling, and the action we're going to take as a result, are serving the better world we want to see. And it's so helpful to also know that doesn't mean I have to negate or punish myself for the instinctual thoughts I have around those types of things.

ELISA: Completely. Because the more you punish yourself, the more inadequate you feel, and then you're less likely to engage in dialogue and it just becomes very isolating.

I remember in 2020 experiencing somebody attempting to cancel me over something. So I've been on both sides of the cancel, whatever we want to call it. And I learned so much from that. I just realized that you're going to have people with the same identity factors completely disagreeing with one another too. So it's so hard to navigate.

What I did in that scenario was say, yeah, this is what I did. Do you have questions about it? And nobody came forth. The people who were behind the screens commenting all of a sudden went silent. That was powerful to me. I'm ready to own what I did, to answer questions about it. And that can really scare people, because it's such a deep level of vulnerability — admitting that you did something that harmed some people. Then people don't always know how to respond to that.

And I think that can be a really powerful dynamic — to just admit being wrong, admit having caused harm, even if it was inadvertent. Doesn't mean the harm wasn't caused. And I think a lot of people are afraid right now of acknowledging that they may have done something that hurt somebody else, as though they had lived an absolutely pristine life of not harming anyone.

SHAY: Very difficult. Before we wrap up, I know we're talking about change and redemption right now. Is there any type of reform you wish more people knew about that you would like to see happen in your work?

ELISA: There is something in North Carolina I can speak to called the Second Look Act. I encourage people to look that up. It's a shortened nickname for an actual bill that was put forward. The whole point is that we need to look again at some of these life sentences that were handed down, because some of these people are currently going to spend the rest of their lives in prison, whereas in later years somebody did the exact same thing and got a reduced sentence. There's a lot of inequity over the decades — different things were punished in different ways at different times.

So I encourage people to think about mass incarceration. Definitely read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and think about what is actually going on behind these prison doors. Getting more rehabilitation inside. I know North Carolina is committed to that, and so we're in a period where we're striving toward goals called Reentry 2030.

I want to see a world in which rehabilitation begins inside, there is a pathway to reentry, and upon reentering society there are a lot of supports available — for job readiness, for financial literacy, for a database of landlords who are compassionate. I mean, in some places you can't sign your name on a lease for seven years upon release. You can't sign a lease. You can't get a job. And so —

SHAY: You'd have to go back to prison at that point.

ELISA: Yeah. And for some people — I know this sounds cliche, but I have heard people say that prison has saved their lives. They got off the streets and weren't doing the same drugs that they knew would have caused their death, and now they have a child they're in touch with and they have something to live for.

So there's no one story in prison. You hear it all. People have different perspectives — not always negative, some people have had positive experiences. I just hope people can recognize that 99% of people who are incarcerated do rejoin society as free citizens. How are we, as people who haven't been justice-involved, going to embrace that and be supportive and trusting?

SHAY: Thank you for that.
My niece is snoring. This is so cute.

ELISA: Oh! How old?

SHAY: She's six years old.

ELISA: Oh, okay. Okay.

SHAY: Her mom had to run an errand so I told her to drop the kid off with me. This was so informative and so helpful for me, even. I can't thank you enough. You've really helped heal some things in me with this conversation.