Lauren Frances Winner is an American author and lecturer. She is currently Assistant Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School.[1] Winner was born to a Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother, and was raised Jewish.[2] She converted to Orthodox Judaism in her freshman year at Columbia University, and then to Christianity while doing her Masters degree at Cambridge University. Her autobiographical Girl Meets God has been described as "a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths."[3] A second memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-faith Crisis, to be released in 2012,[4] chronicles her descent into doubt and spiritual crisis that accompanied the failure of her brief marriage to Griff Gatewood.[5]
Winner has worked as a book editor of Beliefnet[6] and senior editor of Christianity Today. She caused a stir among evangelicals in 2000 when she wrote a column that matter-of-factly asserted that few young evangelicals (including she herself) took a commitment to premarital chastity too seriously.[7] Julia Duin suggests that Winner was a "fairly recent convert" at the time, and "the evangelical response to Winner was livid."[8] 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."[8]
Winner is visiting fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.[1] She was ordained as a transitional deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia on June 4th, 2011.[9] Her other books include Mudhouse Sabbath, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity and A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith.