Lauren Winner, assistant professor of Christian spirituality in the Divinity School, is the author of numerous books, including her most recent publication, “Still: Notes on a Mid-faith Crisis,” a memoir detailing her struggles with God and spirituality after a period of divorce and loss. Winner writes and lectures on Christian practice, the history of Christianity in America and Jewish-Christian relations. The Chronicle’s Arden Kreeger corresponded with Winner about her conversion from Judaism to Christianity and plans for future publication.
The Chronicle: When did your conversion from Judaism to Christianity begin?
Lauren Winner: My conversion unfolded during college and culminated in my baptism about 10 months after I graduated from college. Sometimes, post-college adults, I think, don’t take the spiritual journeys of college students very seriously. But an enormous amount of important spiritual growth and spiritual change can happen during college.
TC: What advice do you have for college students who feel as though they are going through a spiritual transition?
LW: I don’t know that I’d give college students any different advice than what I might give anyone. Spiritual transitions can be scary—as many holy things often are. Among other things, I think it’s important not to take these journeys in isolation—bring into your journey someone you respect, perhaps someone with a little more life wisdom. For me, in college those people included an aunt, a former high school teacher and a campus minister.
TC: How has writing helped develop your spirituality?
LW: I never really know what I think about anything unless I’ve written about it. So although I sometimes sort through happenings in my spiritual life in conversation, I more often sort through them on paper. In my current book, “Still,” for example, I have a chapter examining my coming to a place in life where I couldn’t or wouldn’t pray. I didn’t really understand why that had happened—why I had stopped praying—until I had written about it and rewritten. I came into real understanding well after 10 drafts of that chapter. Similarly, I never get very far with Scripture if I’m just reading it or hearing it read aloud. I get further if I am writing about a passage of Scripture.
TC: How has your relationship with literature and books helped develop your spirituality?
LW: Reading has been absolutely crucial in my spiritual life. I began reading obsessively about religion as a kid. Reading memoirs by Christians and a few Christian novels were key to my conversion and key to my learning how to be Christian after being baptized. When I was going through the aforementioned season of not being able to pray, I read lots of books about prayer. This was a sort of greedy voyeurism, spying on people who could pray, even as I could or would not.
TC: What are you reading right now?
LW: Back issues of The Economist, “Complications” by Atul Gawande, “The Best American Essays 2001” and “Our Sound is Our Wound” by Lucy Winkett.
TC: In an interview with North Carolina Public Radio, you compare the middle phase of one’s spiritual development to a game of chess. How do you define this concept of “spiritual middle,” and what advice would you give to someone struggling with this phase of their spirituality?
LW: The spiritual middle is great. You have to bear with some difficult things in the middle of the spiritual life—perhaps seasons of boredom, perhaps season of spiritual despair, perhaps a new, startling encounter with God’s hiddenness—or God’s absence. But the middle of the spiritual life also promises to teach you new things. It is a space where you will learn things about God that you didn’t know before. In “Still,” I write about the “middle tint.” That was a phrase much used by artists in the 19th century. It denoted a particular palette —the grays, the browns and blues and dull brick reds, the colors you might not notice if you are not looking for them. These colors are themselves sort of bland, but they are the very thing that allow your eye to dwell on, and see as important, the sharp slashes of black and white (colors that pop, even as they don’t actually take up much of the canvas). I’d suggest that the middle tint is the palette of faithfulness. The middle tint is going to church or mosque each week, opening the prayer book each day. It is rote, unshowy behavior, and you would not notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but it is necessary. Occasionally you will hear an annunciation, but much of the spiritual life may be spent in the middle tint.
TC: In an interview with journalist Shala Carlson, you discuss the value of making personal decisions with the community in mind. How can Duke students invite their community into their personal decisions, and what value might these types of thought processes hold for the University?
LW: This is indeed one way that I think college students have an advantage over the rest of us. For most people, the season of life in which one lives most fully, most easily, in community is college. For in college, you are actually living with, eating with, taking classes with, hanging out with the same group of people. So I see college as a great time for developing the habit of living in community, of really sharing your life with community—in part so that once you leave college and enter the somewhat more atomizing and atomized wider world, you have the instincts and skills of life in community.
TC: What type of writing are you working on now, and do you have plans to publish another book?
LW: I am working on a book about dislocated exegesis, the practice, which I discuss briefly in “Still,” of reading the Bible in unexpected locations. What gets opened up if you read Jesus’ words about wealth at a bank? Or the biblical words that Puritans used to justify killing Quakers at the very spot of the Quakers’ martyrdom?
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