About Wakoh

Rev. Dr. Wakoh Shannon Hickey is a professional interfaith chaplain in Northern California. She has extensive experience supporting people of any faith or none, in hospice, hospital, university, and community settings. She has practiced Sōtō Zen Buddhism for more than 40 years and has been an ordained priest in that tradition since 2003. She is a Candidate for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, as well. She loves to fly stunt kites.

​

Wakoh (和幸) is the Buddhist name she received at ordination. It rhymes with "taco" and means something like "Harmony and Happiness."

She is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association; the Association of Professional Chaplains, through which she received Board Certification in 2024; the Spiritual Care Association; the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab; the American Academy of Religion; and the Napa Interfaith Leaders Council.

Wakoh was the first Buddhist chaplain at Duke University, where she completed an interdisciplinary PhD in religion and modernity, and was a Buddhist campus minister at Johns Hopkins University, while teaching at a Catholic university in Baltimore. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students as well as adult learners in the community.

Wakoh grew up in the Napa Valley and attended college at UC Berkeley and seminary at Pacific School of Religion. Her first career was in journalism. As a scholar, she has specialized in North American religious history, Buddhism in Asia and the West, religion and medicine, and interfaith engagement. She is the author of Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is a certified Leader of InterPlay®.

​

Click here for links to selected articles, sermons, Dharma talks, interviews, and reflections.