Mark Silk was the founding director of the Greenberg Center from 1996 to 2023, and a professor of religion in public life at Trinity College. He graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Greenberg Center, and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center until 2015 that examined how the news media handle religious subject matter. In June 2005, he was also named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and of the Center’s Future or Religion in America series published by Columbia University Press. With Andrew Walsh, he was co-author of the book One Nation Divisible: Religion and Region in America Today. Since 2012 he has been a regular blogger and columnist for the Religion News Service.
