GABRIEL ZAKAIB

The shiny red glasses Miranda Hovemeyer peers through might be the first sign of her eccentric character, but for a small subsection of struggling college students, they are the face of just the beginning of a rabbit hole of questioning.

 

Hovemeyer is one of those hidden, limber, gray-haired figures on campus you might catch once in passing. That is, unless you seek her out.

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What is my purpose in life? Why do bad things happen to good people?

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In a basement office inside American University's spiritual life building, Hovemeyer murmurs with students questioning the foundations of their identity, the kind of questioning that spawns out of the tension between friendship and loneliness, new identities and old expectations and the uncertainty of a new adult far from home.

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Hovemeyer's quiet counsel reaches only a small subsection of American's 8000+ student body, but nevertheless she offers a corner of refuge to a young generation struggling with historic rates of loneliness, depression and purposelessness.

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Hovemeyer, who is classically educated with a masters degree in religious studies and another from a seminary school in Washington, draws a book off of the wooden shelf behind her. She is energetic but tedious, so as not to step on the toes of my worldview. “Have you read this one,” she asks. I had not. 

 

She rested the book on the table between us as a sort of quiet offering. She had made offerings like this with students before. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, she said, tells the account of Nazi concentration camp survivor in search of a will to live.

 

In the end, Frankl discovers human connection, doing deeds for others, as the meaning and purpose of his life. Amid the senseless violence of the Holocaust, Frankl had located human worth in a relationship to the other. Human connection, she said, is the point.

 

I had not asked Hovemeyer for a 1946 account on the meaning of life. But Frankl had found wisdom buried in the worst of circumstances, she said. Human connection, she continued, is the point. She put the book back on the shelf. I knew it would find its place on the table again soon.

 

Hovemeyer is a humanist, committed to the secular life philosophy that positions human love and agency as transcendent of any higher power. Although relatively unheard of (only about two percent of the population identifies as such), the philosophy enjoys the protections of a religion in the United States.

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Over the past two years, Hovemeyer has counseled students and hosted programming as American’s humanist chaplain. She spends most of her time meeting with students one on one, she said, about 20 each month. Many of them are grappling with social isolation, to understand their identities or to find a larger source of meaning. 

 

They are not alone. A Harvard survey found 58 percent of college students lacked meaning or purpose in their life over the past month. And, at least since 2023, America has struggled with a sweeping epidemic of loneliness, according to a report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Humans are social creatures; isolation burdens health as much as smoking a pack of cigarettes each day.

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It is no wonder students are grasping for meaning and purpose. They have been left out to dry by decades of an extreme American individualism to define their own identity, morality and life purpose, David Brooks argued in his final column for the New York Times.

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This has been the critique of post-modernism. America's newest generation of adults are opening their eyes to an infighting country without shared pillars of moral code, sacred heroes, or an agreed upon cultural story. The third spaces that enable in-person connection are decaying as the digital world swallows the functions of work, socialization and sex. The technological achievement of the internet, meant to usher in an era of radical connection, has instead brought dangerous isolation, Surgeon General Murthy warned. While young people have grown up trafficking in these digital currencies, many yearn for the return of third spaces and delete their social media apps altogether.

 

"Life has become objectively better but subjectively worse," Brooks wrote. "We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for."

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 Lurking in the background of these statistics is a cloudy void of identity and purpose. It most often shows its face among America’s youth, who amid the decline of the church as a preeminent moral authority, must fulfill their need for a higher cause elsewhere.

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"Generation Z is searching for alternative sources of meaning," Hovemeyer said of her encounters with students. "Meaning outside of traditional religious spaces."

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‘A Never Ending Pit’​

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In the absence of obvious sources of higher meaning, some look for it in financial success.

 

“The hard part is not finding your meaning in capitalism,” Hovemeyer warned.

 

Indeed, if America has a shared culture it would be consumerism. From coast to coast, a shopping sprawl waits off each highway exit. To roll in pricey new cars, annual plethoras of Christmas shopping hauls or sport clothing as shadowy indicators of our status are the unwritten but well-traveled interstates of American society. 

 

It is this notion that university students in the 1960s in-part revolted against with their hippie sit-ins, scrappy clothing and music festivals in the rain. 

 

“Finding meaning in life should not necessarily cost you money,” Hovemeyer quipped with a laugh. “It should not want you to change yourself in a way that doesn’t feel right to you.” 

 

I looked to Hovemeyer’s bookshelf. If consumerism, with its neverending stream of more products to buy, as Hovemeyer described, is like a bottomless pit that can never be full, then Frankl had found a refuge of fulfillment strikingly unquantifiable.

 

Trying to find the meaning of existence in consumption, Hovemeyer said, is “like putting a bandaid over a gaping wound, the wound is still bleeding and growing.” Buying things of value is a poor substitute for the universal need for meaning and purpose, she continued. The bandaid is too small because the problem is bigger than any one human. 

 

“I think that’s why Victor Frankl found his meaning in the service of others is because he wasn’t putting it on himself, he was putting a bandaid on another person, a neighbor, and that in turn put a bandaid on himself.”

 

These are humanist notions. Many religions promise the answers to life are derived from a God or afterlife. But Humanism encourages a discovery of these answers yourself – while you are still on Earth – through rationality, free will and connection with others, according to the American Humanist Association. 

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Answers to Questions of God and Evil

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Hovemeyer is trained in Clinical Pastoral Education, a practice that integrates psychological methods with spiritual needs to address big questions through conversation. She is one of only a handful in Kay Spiritual Life Center with the training. A handful of students from various denominations seek her out for conversation.

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"A lot of the students that come to me grew up in a religious tradition that they no longer identify with and are trying to find out what they do believe."

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Often questioned is the existence of a higher power and the drivers of evil. Organized religions promised these answers, but for students distancing themselves from the ones they grew up in, those questions resurface. 

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"They were told what to believe as children but often it doesn't fit anymore," she said, "because it was in direct opposition to part of their identity. Maybe they're gay, maybe they're trans."

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"I have a Muslim student who meets with me who loves Islam. I think their meaning and purpose right now that they're getting in life is to be a better Muslim," she said.

 

"I think that that's what a good spiritual leader does, is say the answers I have to these questions might not look like the answers you have to these questions, and my job is not to give you my answers, it's to help you find the answers that are right for you."

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"I'm a chaplain. The role of a chaplain is interfaith," she said, "to help you connect with what gives you meaning and purpose in life."

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That commitment to inclusion has defined Hovemeyer beyond her work at American. Jack Gordon, a documentary filmmaker and past interfaith organizer who collaborated with Hovemeyer in Washington since 2013, recalled the moment he first noticed it. When Jack offered a prayer at an interfaith event — what he described as an "interfaith faux pas" — Miranda raised her hand to interject. What was a prayer doing at an interfaith event, she asked? Not everyone prays.

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Gordon took it in stride. "It shows, more than anything, that she cares about the quality of the event, the inclusion." He reached out to her afterward: "Hey, I really appreciate what you said, how about you put some skin in the game and help organize it next time so that we can do better." She did, eventually becoming part of the organization.

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"She embodies that idea of, I don't want to be part of your revolution if I can't dance," Gordon said. "When she sees something unjust in the world, she wants to do something about it."

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From Ohio, Hovemeyer grew up in the United Methodist church. She questioned Methodist notions to the clergy there, she said, hardly getting answers. Still, she poured over the Bible, caught in its contradictions.

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When Hovemeyer was 13, a string of deaths rocked her family. Seven of her family members died in a short span of time, she said, some from illness, others amid violence. She returned to her parents' church soon after, sliding into a pew. A woman turned to console her: "I want you to know that God has a reason for that."

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"I think at that moment, I didn't say it to her directly, but something said in my mind, you know, I don't think so," Hovemeyer said.

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"If there is a God that has a reason for this, I don't want anything to do with that God."

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"It was like a giant weight lifted off my shoulder of having to try to make this stuff make sense with theological answers. I don't think there's any reason for this that I will understand other than human beings as organisms get cancer."

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The questions continued as Hovemeyer grew into an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado and then earned a masters of religious studies at Meadville Lombard Theological School. There, she was handed a book on humanism: Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg Epstein.

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"Oh, I believe all of this," she had thought. "I just didn't know there was a name for it."

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'Humanism Needs to Walk the Walk'

 

Humanism has been trying to find itself since the millennium. The movement has historically lived in between library shelves and atheists discontented with traditional religions more than it has in social circles, according to a report from the Harvard Pluralism Project. But the movement is growing.

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"It's not as important right now for atheists to talk with other atheists about how much they hate religion," Hovemeyer said. "The humanism of today is perhaps repairing the social fabric and helping to hopefully end this epidemic of loneliness."

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That philosophy plays out in Hovemeyer's personal life as much as her professional one. In 2024, Hovemeyer and her husband took in a refugee family from the Middle East — a man, a woman and their little daughter, close in age to Hovemeyer’s youngest child. The family lived in her basement for nine months, sharing a kitchen with Hovemeyer, friends of hers recounted. Outside, the children played together.

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Cassandra Lawrence, a Christian chaplain at Grinnell College and longtime friend who met Hovemeyer through interfaith justice work in Washington, has watched her live out her values for more than a decade, she said.

 

"That, to me, is what so much of our friend group is about," Lawrence said. "She believes in advocating for people, but also lives it."

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Gordon agrees. "Her commitment, it's authentic. She really does what she can with what she's got to help build community."

Outside of American, Hovemeyer works as the director of an interfaith non-profit in Washington, the Interfaith Families Project. The group offers interreligious families rejected from a tradition a place to gather. The project caters to over 100 member families.

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"A lot of ways I like to put my humanism to action right now is just connecting human beings to other human beings, and just seeing what my friends and neighbors need," Hovemeyer said.

Hovemeyer’s books sit idly on their wooden shelf as the basement of American's spiritual life building fades into its quiet dusk.

 

Hovemeyer is packing to leave, too. She shuts her office door, adorned with a printed piece of blue paper — humanism lives here, it tells passersbys. Amid the bustle of college campuses, for the loudness of friends, parties and perfection, there is a quiet and lonely student struggling with God and themselves.

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"Humanism's role is to meet that need now," Hovemeyer said. "It's time to walk the walk and not just talk the talk."