Biography:

Greg M. Epstein serves as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His first book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, was a New York Times bestseller and helped launch a dramatic expansion of the field of humanist chaplaincy — professionally trained members of the clergy supporting the ethical and communal lives of nonreligious and religiously unaffiliated people — across North America and beyond. His second book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation, earned multiple awards and recognitions, including being named Best Business Book of 2024 by the Porchlight Business Book Awards, in the “Big Ideas & New Perspectives” category. The product of a several-year investigation into what the New York Times has called “the rise of Silicon Valley’s Techno-Religion,” including serving as the first-ever “ethicist in residence” at TechCrunch from 2019-20, Tech Agnostic has sparked meaningful follow-up efforts. The first of these, beginning in fall 2025, is a series of dialogues with influential religious, spiritual, and ethical leaders and communities on the role of Silicon Valley tech in our lives and contemporary society. With support from the Omidyar Network, the project starts with an assumption that we can make tech that is useful to humans without creating an object of worship, or even a would-be-God. And that it's time to start talking about this as a moral issue.

Greg’s writing has also been published by TIME.com, CNN.com, MIT Technology Review, Nautilus, The Washington Post, and Newsweek; his work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and many more. He is also delighted to be working on a to-be-announced fiction graphic novel series that combines his interests in the future of work and tech, humanism, religion, and the human condition. In his role as a humanist chaplain, Greg also convenes the Harvard-MIT Humanist Student Fellowship, a stipend-supported opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students who identify as Humanists and allies to reflect on who they want to be, and how they want to live.