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Lauren Winner

Lauren Frances Winner (born 1976)^[1][2] is an American historian, scholar of religion, and Episcopal priest. She is Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School.^[3] Winner writes and lectures on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish–Christian relations.^[4]

Winner was born to a Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother, and was raised Jewish.^[5] She converted to Orthodox Judaism in her freshman year at Columbia University,^[6] and then to Christianity while doing her master's degree at Cambridge University, and one of her most popular books, Mudhouse Sabbath, is about becoming a Christian while appreciating the Jewishness of historical Christian faith. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2006.^[7] Winner's fourth book, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Colonial Virginia is based on her dissertation.^[8]

Winner has worked as a book editor of Beliefnet^[9] and senior editor of Christianity Today. In 2000 she wrote a column asserting that few young evangelicals took a commitment to premarital chastity seriously, using the phrase "evangelical whores".^[10] Julia Duin suggests that Winner was a "fairly recent convert" at the time, and "the evangelical response to Winner was livid."^[11] Duin goes on to relate that "Christianity Today quickly demoted her to a staff writer spot when people started asking why such a recent convert in her early twenties and still in grad school had managed to attain senior writer status at such a revered publication."^[11]

Since 2000, Winner's writing and theology has continued to evolve. She completed a Master of Divinity degree at Duke University in 2007. She has served as a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University^[7] and the Institute of Sacred MusicatYale University^[12] and volunteers regularly at the Raleigh Correctional Center for Women.^[13]

Her memoir, Girl Meets God has been described as "a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths."^[14] A second memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-faith Crisis, released on January 31, 2012,^[15] chronicles her thoughts on God as she descends into doubt and spiritual crisis following the failure of her brief (2003–2009) marriage.^[16] Christianity Today calls Still "an instant spiritual classic."^[17] Her other books include Mudhouse Sabbath; Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity; and Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (2016).

Winner was ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia on December 17, 2011.^[18]