Lauren F. Winner

Lauren F. Winner, who has served as vicar at Saint Joseph’s Episcopal Church in Durham, N.C., since July 2021, is a writer, reader, and teacher. When she’s not at “St Joe’s,” you can find her in the classroom at Duke Divinity School, where she is associate professor of Christian spirituality, or at her desk, where she might be reading or writing about overlooked biblical images of God or the history of Christian prayer. Winner’s interests also include Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America, and Jewish-Christian relations. Her books include Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life (Algonquin Books, 2002); Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline (Paraclete Press, 2007); A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale University Press, 2010); Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013); Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne, 2016); and The Dangers of Christian Practice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (Yale University Press, 2018). Her research has been supported by numerous institutions, and she has appeared on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has served as a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered. Winner has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Books and Culture, and Christianity Today, and her essays have been included in several volumes of The Best Christian Writing.

Winner participated in the Lived Theology and Power Workgroup and contributed to the SILT publication Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins. She also presented a lecture for The Capps Lecture Series in Christian Theology in 2012. To browse all the lectures given as part of the Capps Lecture series, click here. For a listing of all our Occasional Lectures, click here.

She is an author of a chapter on Sarah Patton Boyle for our book People Get Ready: Twelve Jesus-Haunted Misfits, Malcontents, and Dreamers in Pursuit of Justice.