Mark Silk 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 first director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines 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.

• Silk, Mark. “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no.1(Spring 1984):65-85.
• Silk, Mark. Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).
• Silk, Mark. Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
• Silk, Mark. Co-editor, Religion by Region (series of volumes on religion and public life in each of eight regions of the United States, Lanham, Md.: Altamira Press, 2004-2006.
• Silk, Mark. “Almost a Culture War: The Making of the Passion Controversy,” in Shawn Landres and Michael Berenbaum, eds., After The Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2004): 23-34.
• Silk, Mark. “Numa Pompilius and the Idea of Civil Religion in the West,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 4 (December 2004): 863-96.
• Silk, Mark. “Why the Papers Love the Scrolls,” Dead Sea Discoveries 12, no. 1 (2005), 95-100.
• Silk, Mark. “Religion and Region in American Public Life, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 3(2005): 265-70.
• Silk, Mark. “Forum: Electronic Media and the Study of American Religion,” Religion and American Culture 16, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 13-18.
• Silk, Mark. “John of Salisbury and the Civic Utility of Religion,” in Rachel Fulton and Bruce Holsinger, eds., History in the Comic Mode (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

• Best article of the year, American Quarterly 1984.
• Grant to write book on religion in the American news media, Lilly Endowment, 1992.
• Grant for series of conferences on news coverage of religion, Lilly Endowment, 1997.
• Grant to establish program on religion and news media, Pew Charitable Trusts, 1998.
• Grant for conference on the International Religious Freedom Act, Rockefeller Foundation, 1999.
• Grant to underwrite Religion in the News, Pew Charitable Trusts, 2001.
• Grant to underwrite Religion in the News and for project on Religion by Region, Lilly Endowment, 2001.
• Grant for conference on religion and the 2004 election, Luce Foundation, 2003.