Winner was born to a Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother, and was raised Jewish.[5] She converted to Orthodox Judaism in her freshman year at Columbia University,[6] and then to Christianity while doing her master's degree at Cambridge University, and one of her most popular books, Mudhouse Sabbath, is about becoming a Christian while appreciating the Jewishness of historical Christian faith. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia University in 2006.[7] Winner's fourth book, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Colonial Virginia is based on her dissertation.[8]
Winner has worked as a book editor of Beliefnet[9] and senior editor of Christianity Today. In 2000 she wrote a column asserting that few young evangelicals took a commitment to premarital chastity seriously, using the phrase "evangelical whores".[10]Julia Duin suggests that Winner was a "fairly recent convert" at the time, and "the evangelical response to Winner was livid."[11] Duin goes on to relate that "Christianity Today quickly demoted her to a staff writer spot when people started asking why such a recent convert in her early twenties and still in grad school had managed to attain senior writer status at such a revered publication."[11]
Her memoir, Girl Meets God has been described as "a passionate and thoroughly engaging account of a continuing spiritual journey within two profoundly different faiths."[14] A second memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-faith Crisis, released on January 31, 2012,[15] chronicles her thoughts on God as she descends into doubt and spiritual crisis following the failure of her brief (2003–2009) marriage.[16]Christianity Today calls Still "an instant spiritual classic."[17] Her other books include Mudhouse Sabbath;Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity; and Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (2016).
^"Archived copy"(PDF). www.harpercollinscatalogs.com. Archived from the original(PDF) on 7 October 2011. Retrieved 13 January 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)