(Religion News Service:) Frederick Buechner was asked on numerous occasions how he would sum up everything he had preached and written in both his fiction and nonfiction.
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
That theme was constant across more than six decades in his career as a “writer’s writer” and “minister’s minister” — an ordained evangelist in the Presbyterian Church (USA) who inspired Christians across conservative and progressive divides with his books and sermons.
Buechner died peacefully in his sleep on Monday (Aug. 15) at age 96, according to his family.
Read the whole story here.
I’ve got a couple books of his I need to read.
I read “Brendan.” I may have read “Godric” too, but I’m not sure.
“This straddling feat has cost him and is, in fact, the central ambiguity of his career. “I am too religious for the secular reader and too secular for the religious reader,” Buechner often laments. Secular reviewers, noting him to be an ordained Presbyterian minister, sometimes prejudge his work. (Buechner has admitted that seeking ordination was probably the stupidest move he could have made for his writing career.)
“On the other hand, conservative Christian readers wonder why the Christian message in Buechner’s novels remains so subtle, and why he insists on portraying characters as, well, human, complete with sexual urges and a disturbing penchant for sin. Buechner responds that he writes of people with feet of clay because they are the only kind of people he has met, including himself.” https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/august-web-only/reverend-frederick-buechner-books-yancey.html