Spiritual Focus on Books April 9, 2012 Issue

Meeting God again and again

Kim Shippey, Senior Editor

Let’s face it, only Lauren Winner, who teaches at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina, and has written five books, including the much-praised memoir Girl Meets God (see Sentinel interview, August 11, 2003), could get away with a four-word chapter and still be a winner! This chapter is titled “a thought, after reading emily dickinson,” and simply says, “God has become illegible”—which pretty much sums up what drove Winner to write STILL: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis in the first place.

STILL: Notes on
a Mid-Faith Crisis
Lauren F. Winner
HarperOne, 2012
244 pages

This is her second memoir, and chronicles her relationship with God as she descended into doubt and spiritual crisis after the death of her mother and the failure of the six-year marriage she so looked forward to in Girl Meets God. Now, she is mourning her loss of faith as well. She hasn’t lost sight of God and the church entirely, but after being “just about the most enthusiastic new Christian you had ever met,” she slams into a wall of doubt and spiritual despair. She no longer finds it easy to make time for church or even for prayer. “All is soaked in darkness,” she writes. “You are fearful. Yet you want to go on.”

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