Randall Balmer, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has lectured to audiences around the country, ranging from the Chautauqua Institution and the New York Council for the Humanities to Smithsonian Study Tours, and he has been visiting professor at Rutgers, Yale, Drew, and Princeton Universities and at Union Theological Seminary, where he is also an adjunct professor.
Mr. Balmer has published widely both in academic and scholarly journals and in the popular press. He has produced op-ed pieces for the Des Moines Register, New York Newsday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the New York Times. He frequently appears as an expert commentator for both local and national media, including CNN, the Fox News Channel, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, CNBC, and The Newshour on PBS. Mr. Balmer is a senior writer for Christianity Today, and his commentaries on religion in America, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate, have appeared in newspapers around the country. One of his essays, "Adirondack Fundamentalism," was included in the ninth edition of The Norton Reader.
His first book, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and the 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 third edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part documentary for PBS. Mr. Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for writing and 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.
Mr. Balmer has written a history of American Presbyterians and a book on mainline Protestantism, Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism. His latest book is Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America. He has recently completed an encyclopedia of American evangelicalism and is currently at work on a history of religion in North America for Oxford University Press.
Mr. Balmer and his wife, Catharine Randall, a scholar of sixteenth-century Calvinism, live in Vermont and New Jersey with their family, two sons, and a daughter.
Randall Balmer, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has lectured to audiences around the country, ranging from the Chautauqua Institution and the New York Council for the Humanities to Smithsonian Study Tours, and he has been visiting professor at Rutgers, Yale, Drew, and Princeton Universities and at Union Theological Seminary, where he is also an adjunct professor.