Christopher Lane Ph.D.

Christopher Lane, Ph.D., taught medical humanities and the history of medicine at Northwestern University until his retirement in 2022, and he remains a member of the university’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. A former Guggenheim fellow awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Slate, TIME, and several other newspapers, journals, and magazines. He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016), on Peale’s self-described “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement in the 1950s.

His other books include The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011), on the history of agnosticism and unbelief, and Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), translated into six languages, on behind-the-scenes changes to the DSM and the creation of the anxiety disorders between the 1970s and 1990s.

Find him on Twitter @christophlane