By Lauren
Rise and Walk Suffering, prayer, and divine healing.
A friend of mine who pastors a large church in North Carolina recently totted up the prayer requests he gets from his parishioners. When they ask him for prayer, what do they want him to pray for? In short, healing. He realized what prompts the vast majority of these prayer requests is illness... more »
To Hell and Back:
Why the Civil War was fought, and how it changed American death.
When I returned to Virginia after my sophomore year of college, I went back to my high school to pose a question to my beloved U.S. history teacher: how, I wanted to know, had I grown up thinking that the Civil War was fought over the tariff? It took exactly one week in a college history class... more »
Against the Cell
Yesterday, as I walked across campus, I tried a little experiment: I counted the number of people I saw talking on cell phones. Throughout the afternoon, as I dashed in and out of libraries and cafeterias, I counted 62 people walking alone, cell phones glued to their ears... more »
After Divorce — review of
Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce
Elizabeth Marquardt’s book sat on my shelf for many weeks. I really wanted to read it. I had heard about her research and had been intrigued. Yet I kept avoiding actually opening the book. It does not take a shrink to tell me I was avoiding it because I didn't want to take a look into this particular mirror... more »
Sleep Therapy
In search of a counterculture for the common good... more »
“Who are my mother and my brothers?” The Gospels Don’t Preach Family Values
Anticipating the holiday, I’ve set up six small crèche scenes, clay and porcelain re-creations of the Holy Family, throughout my house. And I’ll be traveling to spend Christmas with family in Georgia. The centrality of family to the holiday has prompted several prominent megachurches to close their doors this Christmas Sunday... more »
A Narnia Without Lewis or Aslan — review of The Giant Surprise
If you go to Amazon.com to purchase Harper Collins’s recently released picture book, The Giant Surprise, you will find that C. S. Lewis gets first billing under the “About the Author” header. That’s accurate only insofar as God... more »
Heeding God’s Call — review of The Prison Angel
Mother Antonia’s Journey From Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail
Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan did not expect to spend three years hanging out with a Roman Catholic sister. They stumbled over Mother Antonia while interviewing a woman who had once been incarcerated at Tijuana’s La Mesa prison... more »
In Search of the Good Marriage — It’s Not Just Couple-Centered
October 2004
A few days after I got engaged, my mother presented me with a Barnes & Noble gift card, which a colleague had given to her. “You can have this gift card,” she said, “but you must promise to buy that book that was just on Oprah... more »
Disciplining Other People’s Children
October 2001
From your child’s friend in your house to the neighborhood kid on the playground, when-and how-should you step in?... more »
Psychic Pursuit — review of If the Spirit Moves You, Life and Love After Death
When the journalist and shopaholic Ruth Picardie died of breast cancer, she left behind toddler twins and a widower, Matt Seaton; fans all across Britain more »
About Lauren
The New Faces of Chastity
By Rachel Kramer Bussel
Lauren Winner is an unlikely poster girl for abstinence before marriage. Forget images of nuns, scolds, and dowdy politicians. She wears cat’s-eye glasses, sparkly tights, and a charming smile. As we chat, our camaraderie is surprising; after all, her book Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity argues that the only good, honest, and moral sex is between a man and woman married to each other. Somehow, despite our differences, I’m at ease with Winner and can listen openly... more »
Chastity as God Intends
By Kate Harris
When Lauren Winner wrote about her conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity in her 2003 memoir, Girl Meets God, her frank recognition of the complexities of newfound faith were unpredictable and charming. As she takes up the question of sex and chastity in her new book Real Sex, her candor is not only resonant, it is uniquely insightful... more »
Sexuality in Contemporary Christianity
By Wayne A. Holst
Real Sex and Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality are books that take healthy human sexuality and faith seriously but from different perspectives and experiences. more »
Real Sex, Victoria’s Secrets and the Liberating Image of God
By Bryon Borger
A few years ago we hosted a reading by an author we didn?t know personally for an evening, which ended leaving us deeply glad to be in this business. We had already known the early work of Lauren Winner...
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Reviewer’s choice: Real Sex
By Robin Galiano Russell
Ms. Winner, the author of Girl Meets God, provides a thoughtful, literate and biblical take on sex, knowing it will sound "strange, backward, repressed" to secular ears... more »
Review: Real Sex
By Lisa Ann Cockrel
When I was 15 I cut out a four-by-two-inch piece of paper from my copy of Brio magazine and signed it. On the piece of paper was a vow that made me part of the-then newly emerging True Love Waits movement... more »
A Church That’s Too Embarrassed To Talk About Sex
By Craig Dunham
In the 1998 movie Pleasantville Tobey Maguire plays a modern-day teenager fascinated with late-1950s America, as brought to him through the miracle of Pleasantville television re-runs in all their black and white glory... more »
Born Again...and Again
By Reeve Lindbergh
Lauren Winner’s spiritual memoir, Girl Meets God, is a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths. The child of a Reform Jewish father and a “lapsed Southern Baptist” mother, Winner was raised as a Jew in the South... more »