| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Lauren Winner | |
use both this parameter and |birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) -->| death_place = | nationality = American| other_names = Lauren Frances Winner| spouse = | awards = | website = | module =
| Child: | yes |
| Religion: | Christianity (Anglican) |
| Church: | Episcopal Church (United States) |
| Ordained: | 2011 (priest) |
| module2 =
| Child: | yes |
| Thesis Title: | Material Culture and Household Religious Practice in Colonial Virginia |
| Thesis Year: | 2006 |
| Workplaces: | Duke University |
| signature = | signature_alt = }}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." 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 and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale 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]