Since 2008, Lynn Cooper, A02 has served the spiritual and sacramental needs of our diverse 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.
Her spouse, Andrew, is a Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain. Together they delight in their little tyke, Rory. If becoming a mom has taught her anything it is that spirituality can—and must—thrive in the mucky, messy and mundane.
