Randall Balmer

A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. Before coming to Dartmouth in 2012, he was Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University and at Barnard College for twenty-seven years. He has lectured at the Chautauqua Institution, the Commonwealth Club of California and the Smithsonian Associates and to audiences around the country. He has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and at Rutgers, Yale, Drew, Emory, Northwestern and Princeton universities, and he has also been a visiting professor in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Mr. Balmer was Adjunct Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary for seventeen years, and from 2004 through 2008 was a Visiting Professor at Yale Divinity School. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 2006. Mr. Balmer, who earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985, has published widely both in academic and scholarly journals and in the popular press. His commentaries on religion in America have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Des Moines Register, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the San Diego Times-Union, the Dallas Morning News, Slate, the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Newsday, the Albany Times-Union, the Nation and the New York Times. His first book, "A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies," won several awards, and his second book, "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America," now in its fifth edition, was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. Mr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for his script-writing and for hosting that series. His second documentary, "Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham," was aired on PBS and also appeared in A&E's Biography series. "'In the Beginning': The Creationist Controversy," a two-part documentary on the creation-evolution debate, was first broadcast over PBS in May 1995 and then recut and broadcast in fall 2001. The author of more than a dozen books, Mr. Balmer has co-written a history of American Presbyterians, a book on mainline Protestantism, and another book, "Protestantism in America," with Lauren F. Winner. Other books include "Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism," published by Baylor University Press, and "Religion in Twentieth Century America," part of the Religion in American Life series, published by Oxford University Press. A spiritual memoir, "Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith," published by Brazos Press in 2001, was named "book of the year" (spirituality) by Christianity Today. More recently, "God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush," was released by HarperOne in January 2008, and "Evangelicalism in America" was published by Baylor University Press in 2010. His first biography, "Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter," was released in 2014.