Student Profile: Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, MTS '25
After spending several years working as a teacher and public health advocate, Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, MTS '25 and CRPL candidate, began looking for new avenues that engage education and justice. She describes her work as bringing “the power that is reaching out and finding some connection to something greater than ourselves.” Through her work as an educator in carceral spaces, Bliss-Burger helps to foster that connection despite the challenges presented by working within the prison system.
Bliss-Burger grew up in the small mountain town of Cañon City, CO. She recalls being surrounded by nearly “11 correctional facilities.” She says, “It was just second nature that you would drive by and not think anything of it. A lot of my friends' family members were corrections officers. They were librarians, nurses, teachers, and [incarcerated people] were just members of a visible but invisible population we never thought about.”
After several years working in education and community health, Bliss Burger found herself back in her hometown once the pandemic hit. "We were all floundering, trying to find forms of human connection and meaning," she recalls. She began looking for new connections through her work as an educator, and soon joined Abolition Apostles and From Prison Cells to PhD, two prison justice organizations focused on providing professional and spiritual resources to incarcerated people nationwide.
"Around that same time,” Bliss-Burger says, “I was going through the experience of losing my mom who was, at her core, a teacher. Part of her teaching philosophy and her parenting philosophy was this concept of ‘never stop writing; your story is never going to be done until you say it is, and no one else has the power to tell your story except you.’ And so, I wove this interconnection with my mom—which feels very divine and spiritual—into my work in decarceration. I started to consider what it would be like to do work at the intersection of spirituality, education, and decarceration full-time.” Bliss-Burger decided to explore adult education as a counselor at Rikers Island in New York, one of the world’s largest prisons.
Between her work coordinating penpal connections at Prison Cells to PhD and serving as a counselor at Rikers, Bliss-Burger realized that the work she was doing was not only educational. She says, “The majority of the curriculum I taught was life skills like financial literacy, relapse prevention, [and] healthy relationships. Yet almost every conversation converged with all types of spirituality. People would bring poems to group that grounded them. People would reference the Qu’ran, or a biblical passage.” She continues, “This is what sparked my curiosity in having a religious literate lens when working with incarcerated people, and what it might look like to become a professor in prisons that could bring in the spiritual aspect of learning, and people’s conduits to the divine.”
In the summer of 2023, Bliss-Burger began exploring higher education as a next step in her professional and spiritual journey. She came to HDS to deepen her understanding of the intersection between spirituality, justice, and education. She describes taking a “holistic approach” to designing curriculum, taking the opportunity to pursue cross-disciplinary study by enrolling in classes at Harvard Divinity School, MIT, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School.
“It was the conversations in my first semester class, ‘Religious Literacy and the Professions,’ that really started to ignite what would it look like to design curriculum focused on religious literacy, expanding the notions of religious education and spiritual devotion,” she says.
Bliss-Burger felt inspired by the teachings of Professor Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart, RPL Government Fellow about “infusing the spiritual into the worldly.” She says, “I want to infuse my own spirituality and divinity into my work, and have other people access theirs in a place that often is void of connection and void of recognizing possibility.”
by Shir Lovett-Graff, MTS '24