The Meaning is in the Waiting: The Spirit of Advent »

Lauren F. Winner is the author of three books Girl Meets God Mudhouse Sabbath and Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity. She has appeared on PBS's Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and has written for The New York Times Book Review The Washington Post Book World Publishers Weekly Books and Culture and Christianity Today. Winner has degrees from Duke Columbia and Cambridge universities and holds a Ph.D. in history. The former book editor for Beliefnet Lauren teaches at Duke Divinity School and lives in Durham North Carolina. Lauren travels extensively to lecture and teach and during the academic year of 2007-2008 she is a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. (While there she's revising her dissertation which examines household religious practice in eighteenth-century Virginia for publication.) When she's home you can usually find her curled up on her couch or screen porch with a good novel.

This thoughtful book is arranged for daily reading in the hectic run-up to Christmas- enabling readers to focus more on God’s presence now than on some imagined future. Using examples of biblical characters with whom the candles on the Advent wreath are traditionally associated, the author helps us to discover very different kinds of waiting.