The Duke Divinity School Office of the Dean will host a March 27 retirement lecture given by Grant Wacker, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Christian History, who is retiring at the end of the 2014-15 academic year after serving on the faculty for almost 23 years.

The public lecture, “Reckoning with the Past,” will be held from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. in Goodson Chapel with George Marsden, the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, delivering opening remarks honoring Wacker.

Wacker joined the Divinity School faculty in 1992 after teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1977 to 1992. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Stanford University.

The author, co-author, or co-editor of eight books, Wacker specializes in the history of Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, World Missions and American Protestant thought.

His most recent book, America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, has received  extensive attention in national and Christian media since publication in November 2014. He is also the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture published in 2001. Harvard University Press published both books.

Wacker previously served as a senior editor of the quarterly journal, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies and of the American Society of Church History, and a trustee of Fuller Theological Seminary.