Brook Wilensky-Lanford
“I’m less interested in commemorating great individuals than I am in showing how ordinary human actions can produce enormous historical consequences. I’m fascinated by the butterfly effect. What happens when a single person resists, speaks out, refuses, or imagines something different? How does that ripple through history?”
“As Ms. Wilensky-Lanford notes, at the time of the nation’s founding, Baptist firebrands and Deist skeptics worked together in the cause of liberty. Her call for Americans of all backgrounds to protect public religiosity “in all its specificity and messiness” reflects our best traditions. ”
“Despite [its] task’s magnitude, A God-Shaped Nation renders America’s religious odyssey with dazzling, kaleidoscopic breadth: a half-millennium of prophecy, heresy, hierarchs, shamans, demons, holy men, idolaters, preachers, revelators, and much, much bloodshed. It’s a convulsive history in which each generation believed they were the ones who finally saw the light.”
“Wilensky-Lanford shows a tremendous understanding of what makes history exciting without sacrificing contextual details...Besides being wildly entertaining and well-written, its goals are significant, even vital, to the present moment.”
“This book clearly and effectively explains America at its best and worst, providing a full and magisterial accounting of church and state.”
“[A God-Shaped Nation] soars, thriving on multiple accounts of imported and native-grown religions that have flourished in America’s spiritual hothouse and tackling, with relish and insight, the nation’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century religious, cultural, and political engagements.”
“A pleasure. Wilensky-Lanford tackles her subject with an appealing mix of serious research and tongue-in-cheek humor. Neither too academic nor too whimsical, the storytelling in Paradise Lust is often irresistible.”
Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher. She is the author of A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2026), which Booklist called “a full and magisterial accounting of church and state,” and Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011), a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. A former managing editor of the twenty-five-year-old literary magazine Killing the Buddha, Brook's work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere.
In an interview she was asked about the role religion and religious struggle have played in shaping American history. She responded, “Anne Hutchinson challenged religious authority. Roger Williams opposed the merger of church and state. Mary Dyer was executed for being a Quaker. These were deeply religious people. They weren’t rejecting religion. They were rejecting religious domination. I think we lose something important when we flatten those stories into simple textbook narratives. These were ordinary individuals confronting structures of power. Their actions helped create traditions that later generations would build upon.”
Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.
“Dense, absorbing... [Wilensky-Lanford’s] interest in her subject is deep, her narrative is expertly layered, and her interpretations of the seekers’ motives are more than convincing.”
“A gloriously researched, pluckily written historical and anecdotal assay of humankind’s age-old quixotic quest for the exact location of the Biblical garden.”
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© Tammy Lamoureux
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