WINNER, Lauren F. 1975?-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1975, in Asheville, NC; daughter of Dennis Winner. Education: Columbia University, B.A., work toward Ph.D. (history of religion); Clare College, Cambridge, M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Lives in Charlotte, VA. Office—c/o Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188.

CAREER:

Writer and editor. Christianity Today, senior writer; Beliefnet.com, former book review editor.

WRITINGS:

(With Randall Balmer) Protestantism in America, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

Mudhouse Sabbath, Paraclete Press (Brewster, MA), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and Washington Post.

SIDELIGHTS:

As a teen, Lauren F. Winner so enthusiastically embraced the Orthodox Jewish faith to which she was exposed by her Reformed Jewish/lapsed Southern Baptist parents that it came as no surprise when she announced her conversion to Orthodox Judaism upon her arrival at Columbia University as a freshman. It was a surprise when, four years later, she announced her second conversion to evangelical Christianity. Fully embracing the Episcopalian faith while a graduate student at Cambridge University, Winner has chronicled her spiritual journey in Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life. In her book she explains: "What draws me to a religion is the beliefs, the theologies, the books, the incantations, the recipes to get to God, and I like to imagine that they work in the abstract, that they are enough, that they exist, somewhere, pure and distinct from the people who enact them."

Reviewers found much to enjoy in Winner's autobiographical excursion. As Andrea Jeyaveeran pointed out in her Sojourners review, one of the compelling aspects of Girl Meets God is Winner's "quirkiness," a characteristic Jeyaveeran maintained "shines through in anecdotes that infuse the book with much of its appeal." Related the reviewer, prior to Winner's conversion, the young woman "has an epic dream about being kidnapped by a band of mermaids and taken to live for a year under the sea. The dream culminates with her rescue by a Daniel Day-Lewis–like hero who she realizes upon waking, with absolute certainty, is Jesus." The clincher was a reading of Jan Karon's novel At Home in Mitford the summer of her senior year at Columbia University. In reviewing the book for the New York Times Book Review, Reeve Lindbergh felt much the same as Jeyaveeran, commenting that "The sheer energy of [Winner's] … quest, combined with her refreshing honesty and flashes of wild humor, give her story its edge."

Praising Winner's book as "learned and discerning" Wilson Quarterly contributor C. Michael Curtis noted that Girl Meets God is "neither a repudiation of Orthodox Judaism nor a celebration of Protestantism's putatively unique virtues." In the Christian Century Mark Oppenheimer viewed the work from two levels—as a spiritual memoir and as literature, and noted that while Winner's Girl Meets God succeeds on the second level, "as a spiritual memoir her book is a failure in the ways that spiritual memoirs almost have to be: communion with God, like falling in love, is almost impossible to describe convincingly to the uninitiated." Joyce Smothers had a different take on the book, describing it in her Library Journal review as a "sexually frank portrait of a deeply engaged faith shopper" that provides readers with a new "perspective on the ways religion relates to the lives of Gen Xers."

Winner's spiritual memoir is only one aspect of her career as a writer. A staff writer for the magazine Christianity Today, she has also collaborated with coauthor Randall Balmer on the volume Protestantism in America, part of the "Columbia Contemporary American Religions" series. The volume provides an historical overview of the growth of Protestant denominations in the New World, drawing on recent scholarship in their discussion of both evangelical and liberal Protestant theologies and how they deal with such issues as feminism, homosexuality, and other contemporary social issues. While praising the book for its coverage of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other faiths, Richard Wightman Fox took issue with the book overall in his Christian Century review, questioning whether "such a thing as 'Protestantism' really exists." Drawing on the writings of such theologians as H. Richard Niebuhr, Fox noted that, for many modern theorists, "the only thing Protestants ever had in common … was anti-Catholicism."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Winner, Lauren F., Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2002, Ilene Cooper, review of Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, p. 292.

Books and Culture, November-December, 2002, Betty Smartt Carter, "Twice Chosen: A Young Convert to Orthodox Judaism Converts to Christianity," p. 9.

Christian Century, October 9, 2002, Mark Oppenheimer, review of Girl Meets God, p. 23; October 23, 2002, Richard Wightman Fox, review of Protestantism in America, p. 40.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2002, review of Girl Meets God, p. 1115.

Library Journal, August, 2002, Jan Blodgett, review of Protestantism in America, p. 102; November 1, 2002, Joyce Smothers, review of Girl Meets God, p. 97.

New York Times Book Review, December 15, 2002, Reeve Lindbergh, "Born Again … and Again," p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, August 12, 2002, review of Girl Meets God, p. 293.

Sojourners, November-December, 2002, Andrea Jeyaveeran, "Reinventing a Religious Self," p. 50.

Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2002, Susan Lee, "No Ordinary Path," p. W27.

Wilson Quarterly, winter, 2003, C. Michael Curtis, review of Girl Meets God, p. 122.*