By Emily Gardiner Herzog

A homeowner in Norfolk for nearly ten years, Liz Bucar lives primarily in Brookline, Mass., where she is a professor of religion at Northeastern University. With her partner, Alexis Zubrow, she raised daughter Zoe, who will head to college in the fall. She has also led a student walk along 150 miles of the Camino in Portugal for five years, guiding Northeastern undergrads as part of the university’s summer Dialogues of Civilizations program, in which they examine the concept, performance, and experience of pilgrimage. And this spring, Bucar is publishing her first trade book, “Be-yond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us.”

Her scholarship has long examined religion’s appearance in unexpected spaces, as well as its multivalent power as a cultural force, even in our contemporary and ostensibly secular context. Bucar published “Creative Conformity” in 2011 and “The Islamic Veil: A Beginner’s Guide” in 2013. Her first award-winning book, “Pious Fashion” (2019), analyzed self-presentation by Muslim women in the modern world. Her last book, “Stealing My Religion” (2024), explored how ‘trendy’ practices such as yoga—in which she is a certified instructor—and meditation can co-opt, reclaim, and perhaps misunderstand deep-ly-rooted, devoutly-conceived ideas belonging to ancient faiths. In “Beyond Wellness”, she personally explores self-described ‘spiritual’ practices with devoted followings–detoxes, psychedelics, and more–with an eye to revealing how the religious, ethical, and cultural roots of these self-healing efforts are indivisible from their potential benefits. Bringing us with her on this journey, Bucar invites us to understand how activities we reductively label ‘spiritual’ are part of a quest to reconnect with what religion has always offered us.

Bucar’s prolific and informative Substack, “Religion, Reimagined,” shows how her academic research and work for a general audi-ence interact in lively, essential dialogue. As she puts it, 2025, the year she launched the Substack, is when she “learned to write in two registers at once.” Toiling on “Beyond Wellness” with her editor and “finding my voice as a writer–not academic me, not professor me, just me,” she simultaneously began posting chatty, incisive, and enlightening ruminations. Topics ranging from Christianity and diet culture to the emergence of artificial intelligence as a quasi-spiritual guide to religion and spirituality in the lives of Gen Z to moral injury in the military. Attacking knotty, controversial topics with the care and perspective they require, Bucar appends her discussions with recommended reading lists to inspire more learning and conversation. In less than five months, her subscribers on “Religion, Reimagined” grew to 13,000 and her Instagram account to 40,000 followers, with one carousel on the topic of Deepak Chopra hitting one million views. Bucar believes this happened because the time spent developing that “just me” voice had “taught me what I actually wanted to say and how to say it… I thought I needed to wait for the book to be published, wait to be ‘ready’ for public work. Then I realized: nobody was going to give me permission; I had to take it.”

Combining her academic work with the inclusive, voluble exchanges that result from her general-audience online writing is core to Bucar’s scholarly mission. “Facilitating a seminar where everyone participates. The comments, the DMs, the pushback…they make the work better.” Bucar rejects the conception of academia as “experts dispensing wisdom from on high,” choosing rather to see her role as “creating spaces where people can think together about hard questions.” Reflecting on her choice to challenge Ezra Klein, who in an interview with Ta-Nehesi Coates called on secularized meditation as a way to cope with the anguish of violent injustice, Bucar jokes, “Something about midlife makes you bold… Every piece that went viral scared me first. If it doesn’t make you nervous, it probably won’t make anyone think.”

One of Bucar’s most beautiful Substack posts describes Norfolk’s role as a sacred place for her, a place where both her soul and her intellect are sustained. Giving loving description to many small moments that make up her life in Norfolk—the intricate history of the cabins she lives in, walks and talks with new and old friends, long swims, home-cooked meals, precious time away from city routines she ends with the awe and peace that come simply from wilderness. “We back up against 6,000 acres of protected forest filled with trails. Big rock outcrops, hidden ponds, moose that I never see but see evidence of, so many porcupines that my dog always has to be on a leash. Our cabins butt right up against those woods so they are what I see through the gigantic screen windows of [my writing studio]. There is something sacred about that. And by sacred, I just mean bigger than me, more important than me, or even my own human connections… this cabin has taught me that sacred space doesn’t require religious blessing or institutional mediation. It just requires attention, care, and the willingness to be humbled by something bigger than yourself.” Liz Bucar will host a discussion with Rev. Erick Olsen of her new book, “Beyond Wellness”, at the Norfolk Library on Thursday, June 25 at 5:30 p.m..