Author Brook Wilensky-Lanford (Ph.D., Religion in the Americas, UNC-Chapel Hill) will offer a free public talk about her new book, A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America, published in June from Grove Atlantic. From this epic tale, Wilensky-Lanford will focus in on three often-overlooked moments in American religious history where radically different groups cooperated for a shared end: the Virginia Baptist preachers and Enlightenment Deists who together created the First Amendment in the 1780s, the Charleston Black churches and Union soldiers who celebrated the First Memorial Day ceremony in 1865, and the surprising influence of Allan Ginsberg on the Southern Baptist Convention in 1968. From such inflection points, we can learn about the power of individual action and the necessity of imagining otherwise in a world often portrayed as irredeemably divided. The book will be available for sale and an author signing, thanks to Blue Bicycle Books. And a reception will follow this event.

Biography

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 (June 2026) and Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; both are by Grove Press. A former managing editor of the 25-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. Currently the associate director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, she holds an M.F.A. in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she lives.