A Tufts chaplain on interfaith intimacy, loneliness, and staying human in hard times.
Lynn A. Cooper joins me to talk about Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship—and why friendship isn’t a “nice-to-have,” but a spiritual and civic survival skill. From interfaith practice on a campus under cultural pressure, to the loneliness crisis, Christian nationalism, and the way our phones rewire time itself, this conversation offers a realistic path back to each other.
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Lynn created and directs Be-Friend: The Interfaith Friendship Program at Tufts University. For the past five years, Tufts University Chaplaincy has offered this program to students, faculty, and staff across all four campuses (virtual and in-person options). In the next few months, a digital resource for download will be available thanks to Tufts University. If you would like to be notified when it is available for download, please register here.
https://tufts.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5dSdTNWSJI7mNpQ
Since 2008, Lynn Cooper, A02 has served the spiritual and sacramental needs of the diverse Tufts campus community. In July, 2021, she was appointed Associate Director of the University Chaplaincy.
As an undergraduate, she lived as a devoted Jumbo with one foot in the world of the Department of Religion and the other in Athletics with the Women’s Soccer Team. Her experience at Tufts changed her understanding of what it means to really be church.
Lynn holds a Masters of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and a Doctor of Ministry in Transformational Leadership from Boston University School of Theology. The title of her dissertation was The Sacrament of Friendship: Disrupting Lonely Landscapes in American Higher Education.
Much of Lynn’s work at BU centered on Catholic religious imagination and how sacramental living might help break open the demands of university life. She wonders how we might support a campus culture that encourages reverence for the body, attentiveness to the spirit and an orientation towards the holy in our midst. She’s also passionate about technology use (techno-hygene) and how our devices may be better utilized as doorways to the sacred.
If experience has taught her anything it is that spirituality can—and must—thrive in the mucky, messy and mundane.
Her book, Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship came out in May 2025 published by Fortress Press. You can learn more about her writing and preaching on here.