John Templeton Foundation
Home Approach Chair Participants
 
Participants  
 

Grant Wacker, a historian of American Pentecostalism, is a professor of church history at the Duke University Divinity School. Raised a Pentecostal, he received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and earned a Ph.D. in religion at Harvard University, where he was a Kent Fellow and a Charles Wilson Fellow, in 1979. He had begun teaching religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) two years earlier, and in 1992, he joined the Duke faculty as an associate professor of church history. He was named to his current position in 2002. Dr. Wacker has been a visiting professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and participated in mentoring programs for young scholars at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University, and Purdue University. Recipient of UNC's Tanner Award for Distinguished Teaching, his research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lilly Endowment, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is a former president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (SPS) and serves as co-editor of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, consulting editor of Christianity Today, Christian History, and Pneuma: Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, advisory editor of Books & Culture: A Christian Review, and on the board of editors of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. The author of more than twenty articles in scholarly journals and essays in volumes of collected works, he is an advisory editor of the Encyclopedia of Protestantism, which will be published in six volumes by Routledge, and co-editor of three books on Pentecostalism, including, most recently, (with Daniel H. Bays) The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History, which was published last year by the University of Alabama Press. He is also the author of three other books-Augustus Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (1985), Religion in Nineteenth Century America (2000 and, in a revised and expanded edition entitled Religion in American Life: A Short History, 2002), and the award-winning Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (2001). Named Book of the Year by Foreword Magazine and Outstanding Book of the Year by Christianity Today, Heaven Below is a comprehensive ethnography of the first generation of Pentecostals for which Dr. Wacker received the 2002 Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion and the SPS's 2003 Pneuma Award. He is currently researching a cultural biography of the evangelist Billy Graham, which will be published by Harvard University Press and Wm. B. Eerdmans, and (with Randall Balmer and Harry S. Stout) an interpretive survey of religion in United Sates history, which will be published by Oxford University Press.