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Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

3.75 of 5 stars 3.75 · rating details · 1,061 ratings · 210 reviews

In the critically acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, Lauren F. Winner chronicled her sojourn from Judaism to Christianity. Now, in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Winner describes how experiences of loss and failure unexpectedly slam her into a wall of doubt and spiritual despair: “My belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at livi...more

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published January 31st 2012 by Harperone

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Jun 06, 2012 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: spirituality

Winner found God and related her experience of discovering God and converting from Judaism to Christianity in Girl Meets God. She thought finding God was a done deal, that she was finished with struggle.

Then she divorced her husband and found that God was gone.

Winner was bereft, filled with anxiety, filled with depression and fears. She felt abandoned, alone. She did not know what to do.

She began to do what she does best: she researched others who felt they had lost God and she talked with peop...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Becky rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a sad book. An honest, beautiful collection of thoughts, experiences and reflections on faith and doubt, despair and flickers of hope. Though it was an easy read, I put it down partway through and didn't resume til the library due date loomed large.

In part, I felt responsible for her spiritual crisis. I devoured and loved all her previous books, putting her on a pedestal of sorts. Perhaps I should have regarded her more as sister than teacher, more fellow sojourner than guru. I can't im...more

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May 31, 2013 Emily Goldberg rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book is advertised as exploring what happens at a crisis of faith, when one reaches the "middle" of the spiritual life and feels stuck, or bored, or unsure whether or not to continue. It does not do so in any way that needed to be published.

Lauren Winner is an engaging and gifted writer. Her prose is easy to read and in many places beautiful. However, this story really was not helpful. As others have said, the VAST majority of it was just her self-centered introspection. Not the kind of int...more

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Jan 16, 2013 Lillian Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is stunning and surprising. Here is my review in the Christian Century Magazine:

Still, by Lauren F. Winner
Spring books
Apr 23, 2012 reviewed by Lillian Daniel
Lauren Winner first drew widespread literary attention in 2004 with the spritely spiritual memoir Girl Meets God: A Memoir, which told the story of her conversion first to Orthodox Judaism and then to a Christianity of a Jesus-loving-Anglican-intellectual-evangelical kind. That book, with its fun and its chatty tone, snuck up on m...more

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Nov 16, 2012 Phil rated it 3 of 5 stars

On a whim, late one night this week, I took Still off the shelves. I had read it when it first came out and was slightly bemused by it. I liked Lauren Winner's early books, particular Girl Meets God which encapsulates the conversion experience in an exceptional way. With Still, we find Ms. Winner trying to cope with a living faith after the initial enthusiasm has worn off and we've begun to face the difficulties of living the faith. Ms. Winner is honest here which is the true value of the book i...more

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Sep 29, 2012 Debbie rated it 3 of 5 stars

It gets better...

I almost put this book down quite a few times. The author reveals to us her painful struggles with her divorce and her faith. She brings us through her OCD and intense introspection and I wasn't sure I wanted to continue to go through it with her.

But this book got better as she got better. By the end I was saying over and over again to myself how profound some of her writing was - how beautifully she explained some things.

In one chapter she talks about how she can't always say...more It gets better...

I almost put this book down quite a few times. The author reveals to us her painful struggles with her divorce and her faith. She brings us through her OCD and intense introspection and I wasn't sure I wanted to continue to go through it with her.

But this book got better as she got better. By the end I was saying over and over again to myself how profound some of her writing was - how beautifully she explained some things.

In one chapter she talks about how she can't always say some things out loud because she's afraid she doesn't really mean them with her whole heart, but when she sings them in church - she means them at that moment. I have said that to myself so many times.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"There was a season when, for me, Jesus was no more and no less than the reason I had to stay in a marriage I didn't want to be in. When Jesus was nothing but Rule. I am now beginning to recollect that Jesus is Rule, but that he is also many other things: mother, bread of life, author of my salvation, the bright morning star. We are now getting reacquainted."

She talks about a friend who shared with her pastor father when she was twelve and about to be confirmed that she wasn't sure she could go through with it because of her doubts. Her father said to her, "What you promise when you are confirmed...is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that that is the story you will wrestle with forever."

She quotes ethicist Samuel Wells: "Stories...told with...heroes at the centre of them...are told to laud the virtues of the heroes - for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can't, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally about God." Then she says: "I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God."(less)

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Jul 04, 2012 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a super quick read. In some sense I felt voyeuristic because I slightly know Lauren through my wife, Sarah. It was like reading one of Sarah's friend's spiritual diaries. She of course says its not a memoir, and in some sense I see her point, but in another way it is a lot of narrative about herself. The prose is beautiful and her conversation with a lot of spiritual and theological writers is insightful. I found myself connecting personally in some ways and in other ways not connecting...more

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Jun 24, 2012 Christy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-reading-list

This was well written and thoughtful book, but I just didn’t connect with the author. She had some interesting things to say about the middle time of faith (especially in the part where she discusses the middle voice in Greek), but mostly, it just felt very dry and distant, like Winner was holding her experiences, and therefore the reader, at arm’s length. Sometimes, I even felt like writing this memoir was an intellectual exercise in navel gazing, like she was talking around God, looking for Go...more

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Jun 06, 2012 Grace rated it 5 of 5 stars

Author: Lauren Winner
Title: Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis
Description: I’ve followed Lauren Winner for at least eight years now, first in her account of her conversion, Girl Meets God, through her struggle with remaining chaste as a single Christian and as she gradually got to know the man she would eventually marry in Real Sex. So I was sad to see that this book is a result of her divorce, five years later. Not quite a memoir, the book is composed of the short essays that Lauren does so we...more

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Apr 04, 2012 Kaylea rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: see-blog-for-more-info

I became acquainted with Lauren F. Winner a few years ago when I found her spiritual memoir, Girl Meets God.

That book recounts her faith journey which includes being raised Jewish, a conversion to Orthodox Judaism (her mom wasn't Jewish, and the faith is passed through the mother), and then later, her conversion to Christianity.

Winner's authentic, honest and blunt writing style, along with her faith journey captured my attention.

So when her newest release, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, cam...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Stacey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, read-in-2012, nonfiction, spirituality

2.5 stars. I have mixed feelings about this book. I was not a huge fan of Winner's debut book (a spiritual memoir) Girl Meets God - I found the writing too clever, too self-conscious, and, while she comes across as honest in a way that is meant to be real and raw, I often felt that what was passing for honesty was still a studied attempt at creating a particular image of who she had been and who she had become. Of course, to some extent, that's what memoir is, I suppose.

Still is not as glib as...more

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Mar 31, 2012 Cheryl rated it 4 of 5 stars

I cling to the wall.

Lauren F. Winner tells a story about her mid faith crisis, to make the point that the spiritual life is not a one way street, or is free from static and chaos. My own experience with religion and spirituality yields a point that is similar. What I take away from this book is comfort and some visual insights -- that is to say, her writing provoked meaningful imagery. One image is of a very firm ivory wall, that seems compact, but upon a closer look, it yields and breaks apart...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: theology-spirituality, arc, memoir

STILL consists of reflections by an Episcopalian academic whose mother recently died and whose marriage has ended. The author considers what it is like to experience a crisis of faith where you begin to feel distant from God, doubt that you really know Him, or even doubt that He's even there.

It's a topic that not a lot of Christians are willing to address- we generally don't want to admit that we have moments of childish doubt ("bad, first-world things happened, so God must not love me, wah wah...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Karen Blinn rated it 4 of 5 stars

I stumbled onto this book at my local library and decided to read it as the topic of "Notes on a mid-faith crisis" sounded like an interesting one. And, indeed, that proved to be the case. Lauren Winner is a professor at Duke Divinity School and may, by this time, also be an ordained Episcopalian priest. She was raised Jewish and converted to Christianity at around the age of twenty-one. (An experience detailed in Girl Meets God, a book that I would like to read.) Two events toppled her from the...more

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Feb 01, 2012 Kathleen (Kat) Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, christian-living, christian-self-help, non-fiction, personal-memoir

In her critically-acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, Lauren F. Winner explores her religious identity as she made the transition from Judaism to Christianity. A thought-provoking glimpse into 21st century religion, Winner was praised as "insatiable, and dauntless, in her search for religious truth at whatever the personal cost" by the New York Times.

In Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Lauren offers readers a quietly powerful and fiercely honest exploration of love, loss and what it means to lan...more

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Jan 31, 2012 Kelly Hager rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is her fourth nonfiction title about faith. I read her first, Girl Meets God, when I was wrestling with my own questions about whether or not there was a God. I absolutely loved that, liked her book Mudhouse Sabbath, hated her Real Sex with a passion (I do not now, nor have I ever, grieved my loss of virginity) but loved Girl Meets God enough that I decided to give this one a try.

Still recounts the spiritual crisis Lauren Winner was in after her mom died and her marriage crumbled. If you re...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Katie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Dark Night of the Evangelical Hipster Chick

After reading an advance copy of Lauren Winner’s new (forthcoming in February) memoir Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, it occurred to me that far more egocentric than writing a book all about oneself is the feat of writing a book all about oneself and trying to play it off as a book about anyone or anything else.

Furthermore, the one thing more outrageously premature and obnoxious than writing a memoir—a spiritual memoir, no less—before old or even mi...more Dark Night of the Evangelical Hipster Chick

After reading an advance copy of Lauren Winner’s new (forthcoming in February) memoir Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, it occurred to me that far more egocentric than writing a book all about oneself is the feat of writing a book all about oneself and trying to play it off as a book about anyone or anything else.

Furthermore, the one thing more outrageously premature and obnoxious than writing a memoir—a spiritual memoir, no less—before old or even middle age or even 35, is writing two. There are, of course, exceptional circumstances under which a very young person’s memoirs may be notable or especially insightful. The occasion of being a privileged young academic from the American South East does not rise to this level of notability. Winner cannot be blamed for this, entirely. Confessional prose is one of the few publishing avenues wide open to talented young female writers, and only open then given that they fulfill certain prerequisites (attractive, willing to talk about sexuality…) and even then, privilege and connections are required to even get in the door. Winner’s career as a 30-something serial memoirist illustrates, through no fault of her own, everything that is wrong and corrupt in the current American publishing industry.

Nonetheless, I was excited to read Still, and despite my slight quibbles and larger objections to Winner’s style and theology, I had enjoyed her previous works. The book purports to not be a straight memoir, nor a guidebook, but more of a public service, I suppose, a companion for those of us Christians who might ourselves experience a sort of…dark night of the soul. Which is, of course, an allusion to a work far better suited to serve such a purpose than Winner’s present volume. Winner’s crisis of faith was brought on by the death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage. Or so the blurb tells me. Once I started reading the book, it all became a lot less clear.

The whole book reads strangely. It is as though we are trapped in Winner’s head with her, and it is decidedly a miserable and lonely place to be. Other people are but vague, passing thoughts that pass by on the outside. Events are obscured by constant ruminating. There is no ground to stand upon, no anchor to pull us down, no fresh air to hit our faces and snap us out of the fugue. The marriage is never spoken of in any illuminating detail; her husband is nameless. (I would respect the nod to privacy were he not named in full in her other works and all over the web—given that, this is just odd and confusing.) When Winner speaks of her late mother, it is in weirdly distant terms, passively hostile, perhaps a hint of denial, or perhaps we should take her statements at face value—she really doesn’t miss her? Winner never makes concrete any of the details that make a memoir vivid. While she drops names and tries to impress us with her very Relevant magazine Christian hipster tastes, she doesn’t tell us what her married life was like, really, what she misses, what she regrets, what HAPPENED. Where we are! What’s going on! She just kind of wanders around in a miserable fog, and we are stuck there with her, ruminating.

Because of all of this, we are to believe God is “absent.” Now this is one of my theological pet peeves. Why are we to believe God is absent whenever a yuppy has the flu? It screams of spiritual wimpiness, as it is ALWAYS these spoiled types who are bemoaning the absence of God when anything goes wrong in their lives. The poor working sorts of the world lean on God even more heavily, by and large, when things go bad. The rich and spoilt whine that God has abandoned them when very normal, cycle of life, kinds of bad things go down. It is the definition of self-centered and overprivileged.

In fact, rather like a spoiled child, Winner proclaims that if believing in Jesus means she has to stay married, she just won’t believe! That showed Him! It never occurs to her, I suppose, that it’s not Jesus’ fault that she has chosen to make herself a very public figure proclaiming very authoritatively and very smugly a very rigid form of Christianity. That she chose to make sexual fidelity the focus of her public preaching. That she has chosen to make statements like that it is better to marry just for sex than to have premarital sex and sin. (One might be tempted to pull a Dr. Phil on her about that one.) She has chosen to make her living by loudly narrating her conversion only several scant years after it started—only a few scant years after her prior conversion to Jewish orthodoxy. By now narrating this “crisis of faith” only a few years later, it is as though her spiritual evolution was crippled by her own self-satisfaction in chronicling it, and her vaunted “pure” marriage, much the same. Did she love a man, or the idea of being piously married? She has nothing specific to say about Griff, the man she left. She never seems to see the hubris and hamartia in this little tragedy. Or if she does, she certainly isn’t telling US about them. That would really be risky.

Reading, I just wanted to pull Winner out of herself. She seems to have some vague sense that she is to blame for some of this mess, but she needs to work it out with the people involved, not inside her head, and not with the audience for her memoirs. Theologically, I find this book useless as a teaching moment (although it purports to be one) because she never delves into the concrete matters that brought her to crisis. So she feels like she’s a bad Christian because she married and then quickly divorced. How does she resolve that? It seems she resolves to ignore it and move on—something that tells me that the personal trainwreck resulting in memoir number three can’t be long down the road from here. She doesn’t miss her dead mom, what’s that about? Is it numbness from deep grief? Unresolved something else? What does it mean, spiritually, to feel that way? These questions don’t need to be definitively answered, but they must be at least addressed. But to fall back on a cliche accusation, Winner seems too self-absorbed to have perspective on any of this. Which is perhaps understandable, but it makes her a terrible guide for fellow Christians feeling a spiritual crisis because of personal issues.

I wonder where Winner will go from here. I understand she is planning to become an Episcopal priest, but my sense is that this may just be yet another way for her to run away from whatever anxieties have kept her talking fast and glib since her first memoir. This book was frustrating and unrewarding to read, and I will surely be denounced as a grouch for panning such a fashionable Christian writer. But so be it; Still was a miserable, stifling read.
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Dec 22, 2011 Kristen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: from-the-publisher, memoir, theology

Still by Lauren Winner is aptly subtitled "Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis." It is a collection of reflections from the middle, from a place of messiness, doubt and despair. That terrain is familiar to many and the ability to feel less alone in those moments by reading this book makes it worthwhile.

Winner directly informs readers that this is not a memoir. If you are looking for juicy details about her marriage falling apart, you won't find them here. In the moments the book got the most personal an...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, religion, short-form-essays-and-stories

Got my hands on a galley of this Friday and finished it this afternoon.

Winner insists that this is not a memoir, and I think that is a fair description, though the first third of the book is more like that than the rest. (The first third is also, I think, the most engaging.) For the most part it is a series of meditations on personal experience, which demonstrate well the nature of religious practice, and how those who seek to practice faith make meaning out of what feel like haphazard moments...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Heather Anastasiu rated it 4 of 5 stars

I liked this book. Reading Winner's books always makes me feel like I'm back in Academia, which makes me happy. I like how she's so in love with words. I thought I'd identify more with this book, since I guess you could call what I went through this last half decade was a 'middle,' except I left the faith completely for a few years.

I think some of the things she talks about are symptoms of the same kind of problems that made me leave. God's silence, God's absence. But after I've got some more y...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Carmie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Several years ago, I stumbled onto Winner's memoir, Girl Meets God somewhat randomly. A spiritual memoir appealed to me. So, I read her book about her conversion from Judaism to Christianity and specifically, liturgical Christianity (The Episcopalian Church). I could relate to her bookish and academic nature and Girl Meets God has stayed with me over the years. I'm not sure if I'd have the same reaction today. Sometimes a book is perfect for that moment you find yourself in. I went on to read he...more

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Jun 08, 2012 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Man how does one review a book like this?

Let me start with Dr. Winner has written some things that have provided me with some great theologically underpinnings. Her Book Real Sex gave me a better theology for single-ness as a single Youth Minister. She is a writer that I love to read, and usually her writings leave me going off on tangents in my own mind.

This book is in a lot of ways mirrored in a poem that Winner reads for her family, a grappling with hope/faith in the midst of struggle/despair...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Becky rated it 4 of 5 stars

A few quotes/ideas from this book that I liked:

"My friend Ruth's mother once told her, 'Every ten years you have to remake everything.' Reshape yourself. Reorient yourself. Remake everything. What struck Ruth about this was not just the insight but the source: she had imagined that her mother, her steadfast loving mother, was static, was always the same. She didn't know that her mother had remade everything seven times, eight times. Sometimes the reshaping is not big, not audible; not a move, a...more A few quotes/ideas from this book that I liked:

"My friend Ruth's mother once told her, 'Every ten years you have to remake everything.' Reshape yourself. Reorient yourself. Remake everything. What struck Ruth about this was not just the insight but the source: she had imagined that her mother, her steadfast loving mother, was static, was always the same. She didn't know that her mother had remade everything seven times, eight times. Sometimes the reshaping is not big, not audible; not a move, a marriage, a child, a heroic change of course. Sometimes it is only here inside, how you make sense of things. Sometimes it is only about how you know yourself to be." -- pp31-32.

"The Epiphany story that most tempts my memory is the story of Jesus' baptism. There is John at the river Jordan, and there are all those unwashed people who have come for his baptism and in the queue is Jesus, who is without sin, who shouldn't be in that line with all those sinning people ... it is also Jesus' standing in line by the river that tells us who he is. ... And I am in this baptismal line, too, with all those tawdry first-century sinners, with the embezzler and the adulterer and the prig. I'd prefer to stand aside from them, from the woman who committed infanticide and the man who cooked the books. But I stand here too. It feels like a relief." -- pp35-36.

"I've shown up for chapel at school, and there I stand, reciting a psalm. I must admit I have never much liked the psalms, they have never prayed easy to me. It is, of course, absurd to offer this kind of jejune, self-referential assessment -- what does it matter whether I like the Psalter or not, and how, really, can I find the psalms (which are, after all, both time-tested poetry and also the prayer book of the Jewish people, which is to say among other people the prayer book of Jesus) dull, but in fact I have found them dull for many years and mostly an occasion for woolgathering, and then in a moment I can only call mystery, I am standing there in the chapel reciting Psalm 25, 'Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted,' and the words still me -- there at Morning Prayer, those words are my words; they are the most straightforward expression of anything I might ever have to say to God or to myself. ... The next morning the psalms are dull again, and I am not even really paying attention; except their dullness is enlivened slightly by the small new knowledge that once (and so maybe again someday, maybe this day) the psalms prayed me." -- pp65-66.

"I read a study about children and prayer, conducted by three psychologists in 1967. Their aim was to discover how children's concepts of prayer evolve as children grow older ... they develop; they progress from less sophisticated to more sophisticated. The older child knows that 'The child [is] ... the author of his own prayers.' I realize I am supposed to think this is an advance from the younger child's idea that prayers 'come from God, or from Heaven, or from Fairyland in the sky.' But I do not think it is an advance I think it is something those children will unlearn, later, if they keep praying. I think they will come to know that their prayers do not, in fact, come from themselves. I can participate in prayer (or not), show up to pray (or not), but I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God." -- pp76-77

"It's not necessarily a good thing to be naturally receptive to God's presence. It can be good. But then: 'to be naturally anything can make one not have to undergo the training necessary to make that which is immediate a habit.' ... 'one of God's gifts to some of us is just not to be immediate, so that we have to undergo the kind of discipline necessary to have what others seem to have effortlessly.'" -- p102

"The story ends with Luke's telling us that Jesus often withdrew to lonely places to pray. A little like escaping to the quiet of a museum, I think. What can it means for a placce to be lonely? A place, lonely like Jesus? Lonely like me? Maybe i can make my loneliness into an invitation -- to Jesus -- that he might withdraw into me and pray." -- p141

"On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I with to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see. When I stand with the faithful at Holy Comforter and declare that 'we believe in one God' I am saying 'Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest. I commit myself to this.'" -- p169

"It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: 'Stores ... told with ... heroes at the centre of them ... are told to laud the virtues of the heroes -- for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can't, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally about God.' I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God." -- p193-94(less)

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Feb 18, 2012 Tracy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, christian-thought

This is a book I am going to have to muse over for a while before I know what I think. It is a thoughtfully and beautifully written account of the recent crisis of faith and of life that she found herself facing. I identified with some of the aspects of her feeling of facing a wall and of wondering what she really believed. I think this happens to many Christians who don't have the courage to talk through these issues with their friends--some people are very quick to give pat answers when one of...more

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Jul 19, 2012 Jenny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, religious

Winner’s Still is an honestly unsure reflection on the time in the middle. I can relate to the difficulty in facing a life not marked with the sureness, joyfulness, and self-confidence of initial faith and conversion. She is right, that maybe there is wisdom in accepting that we cannot find the way back to that, and that setting a return course is not a goal worthy of us. Instead, there is a time for sitting with the loneliness and despair – and asking it what it can teach us. I found powerful t...more

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Apr 25, 2012 Dean Anderson rated it 4 of 5 stars

In some ways, I don’t relate very well at all with Lauren Winner. The book is about her struggles with her faith being riddled with doubt (or, more positively, she says, her doubt riddled with faith.) I haven’t had those deep struggles in my Christian walk. A key contributing factor to her spiritual struggles was her recent divorce. I certainly don’t relate well to her there, because my wife is wonderful and , in general, my marriage has been and continues to be easy.

But I still hope that some...more In some ways, I don’t relate very well at all with Lauren Winner. The book is about her struggles with her faith being riddled with doubt (or, more positively, she says, her doubt riddled with faith.) I haven’t had those deep struggles in my Christian walk. A key contributing factor to her spiritual struggles was her recent divorce. I certainly don’t relate well to her there, because my wife is wonderful and , in general, my marriage has been and continues to be easy.

But I still hope that some of the things I learned from this book will help be to help others with doubt and spiritual alienation. And she makes many points and asides that I find very helpful now to my life and ministry. Here are a few of the bits and pieces I most appreciated:
She quotes a friend who says, “Busy is the new sloth”. I love that! So many of us don’t think of ourselves as lazy because are days are so full. But that busyness keeps us from attending to the really important things just as surely as laziness. (Full disclosure – I have been accused of slothfulness.)

She quotes a friend who uses the term, “dislocated exegesis”. It’s the practice of reading Scripture in places that bring unexpected insights. She gives the example of reading the teachings of Jesus about money at a bank. I’ve done this type of thing before. When a youth pastor at Concord Bible Church, we did the life of Christ in San Francisco (reading about Satan tempting Jesus as Coit Tower, calling the disciples at Fisherman’s Wharf, feeding the 5000 while handing out sandwiches to the homeless, etc.) and this inspired me to do this more.

She writes about how the literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks finds no reference to the word “bored” before the 19th century, arguing that boredom is a modern creation. This insight speaks volumes about our (my) self-centeredness.

I liked a reference to ethicist Samuel Wells who notes the distinction between stories about heroes and stories about saints. In a story about a hero, if the hero fails, all is lost. If a saint fails, all may still be well because the story is really about God.

And there is a beautiful image as she watches others take communion. She sees a husband and wife together. Because of dietary issues, there is a man who can’t take the bread and wine. So the wife takes communion for herself, and then again for her husband. A marvelous picture.

Winner has praising quotes on the cover from writers I admire. I was glad I could agree with them wholeheartedly.
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Dec 21, 2012 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Christians struggling with a crisis of faith

Shelves: creative-non-ficiton

Lauren Winner is a noted author, speaker and teacher in Christian circles. She left the faith of her childhood, Judaism, in 1997 to embrace Christianity. She now teaches at Duke Divinity School. I first became familiar with her through reading the memoir of her conversion, "Girl Meets God."

Ms. Winner shares the basic premise of her book right in the preface, "This is a book about God moving away at the same time that God took away the ground. First goes this. Then goes this. Gone are mother, mar...more

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Apr 24, 2012 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

While I am no longer in a mid-faith crisis of my own, it helped me heal even further to read Lauren Winner's elegant, funny, humbled account of her own existential moment in "the middle." I was dissatisfied with the ending, however - we had been on a journey, but I'm not sure we ever arrived anywhere. Maybe that's part of the point, but it was frustrating all the same. When I finished the book, I realized the book didn't really explore the visceral depths of Winner's dark night of the soul - but...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Callie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: religion-spirituality-devotional

Lauren Winner is my favorite contemporary author. I pre-ordered this book and counted down the days until it came out. I was surprised when I read it. It wasn't like Girl Meets God and I'm still trying to figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

There were several questions this book didn't answer for me. She talks a lot about her divorce. She mentions several times knowing it was wrong, but she never addresses how that fits into her spiritual life or her future as a pastor. She touches...more

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Jun 07, 2012 Nathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-love-jesus, books-in-my-office, books-that-is-troo, essays, lives

I started this book with some major misgivings - it felt like another navel-gazing therapy memoir about the breakup of somebody's marriage. What Lauren Winner is doing in this book, however, is way more interesting than that "spirituality/memoir" tag would indicate - these are short snippets of thought, conversation, or reflection, almost like reading accounts of the desert fathers and mothers (who are clearly Winner's inspiration in all kinds of ways.) There is actually some really wonderful an...more

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Autobiography > Memoir

44 users

Religion

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Non Fiction

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Spirituality

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Religion > Theology

19 users

Religion > Faith

16 users

Christian

12 users

Religion > Christianity

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Biography

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Biography Memoir

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About Lauren F. Winner

Lauren F. Winner is the author of numerous books, including Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath. Her study A Cheerful & Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia was published in the fall of 2010 by Yale University Press. She has appeared on PBS’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review, The...more

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Books by Lauren F. Winner

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