From a New York Times obit by Robert D. McFadden headlined “Frederick Buechner, Novelist With a Religious Slant, Dies at 96”:

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister who never held a church pastorate but found his calling writing a prodigious quantity of novels, memoirs and essays that explored the human condition from inspirational and often humorous religious perspectives, died on Monday at his home in Rupert, Vt.

Drawing on literary and theological credentials over six decades, Mr. Buechner published 39 books, many of them well-received fictional excursions into the adventures of charlatans, lovers, historical or biblical characters and ordinary people who take on self-imposed superhuman challenges and stoop to only-too-human skulduggery, all in the name of God.