The Mount Desert Island Historical Society is pleased to welcome author Brook Wilensky-Lanford back to the island for a reading and signing at Hidden Barn Books, 31 Kennebec Place, Bar Harbor on Friday, June 26 at 6:00 pm. Brook will discuss and sign her newest work, A God-Shaped Nation: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America, from Grove/ Atlantic Monthly Press, coming June 9th, 2026.
Ever since conquistadores claimed Taino land in the name of their Catholic God and New England Puritans formed their strictly Protestant “city on a hill,” religion has been central to American life. Even as some found religious freedom—Rhode Island welcomed the Quakers, Jews, and Baptists that Massachusetts expelled as dissenters—indigenous people and Africans forced into slavery struggled to protect their religious practices. With the constitutional separation of church and state, it fell to the American people to decide: would they sharpen religion’s formidable powers of division, or reimagine its creative possibilities?
In A God-Shaped Nation, Brook Wilensky-Lanford follows this essential American tension from first contact through the 2024 election. This is an expansive history of extraordinary religious questions, told through the ordinary people who grappled with them. At a moment when religion penetrates even the most secular aspects of American life, understanding its history is more essential than ever. “It is in history that the very human work of religion happens,” Wilensky-Lanford shows us, “and in ordinary time that even the most carved-in-stone tenets can and do change.”
Local readers may also recognize Wilensky-Lanford from her 2019 contribution to the MDI Historical Society’s history journal, Chebacco, where she chronicled the long history of Zen Buddhism and spiritual seeking on Mount Desert Island.
Join us as we explore the spiritual landscape of our nation with one of MDI’s own.
About the author:
Brook Wilensky-Lanford is a religion writer, editor, and teacher whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, and Chebacco, among others. Her first book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, was a 2011 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Currently the Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship, and a former managing editor of the twenty-five-year-old literary magazine Killing the Buddha, 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. She is also a 1995 graduate of Mount Desert Island High School. For more information: www.brookwilensky-lanford.com