Lauren Winner

Who is Lauren Winner?

Lauren Frances Winner is a historian, author and lecturer. She is Assistant Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School. Winner writes and lectures on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations.

Winner was born to a Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother, and was raised Jewish. She converted to Orthodox Judaism in her freshman year at Columbia University, and then to Christianity while doing her Masters degree at Cambridge University. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2006. Winner's fourth book, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Colonial Virginia is based on her dissertation.

Winner has worked as a book editor of Beliefnet and senior editor of Christianity Today. In 2000 she wrote a column asserting that few young evangelicals took a commitment to premarital chastity seriously. Julia Duin suggests that Winner was a "fairly recent convert" at the time, and "the evangelical response to Winner was livid."