Customer Reviews

John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace

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The editor and contributors do a fine job documenting and interpreting Updike's religious insights using his own words from a wide range of his writings and interviews. It's one of the best resources for literary scholars as well as Christian-minded readers. All will have their spiritual values reinforced and their faith deepened and challenged, enriched, and inspired by this instructive introduction to this gifted Protestant writer and observer of American culture. It also has a comprehesive bibliography.

James Yerkes is the editor of a wonderful collection of essays dealing with the topic of faith in a delightfully down-to-earth manner. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (Eerdmans, $24). That longwinded title may scare away Updike admirers who fear wading in the dark waters of academic posturing. They need not worry, for the book is a relatively breezy read, with only a semi-occasional wandering into verbosity. For instance, Yerkes (who teaches religion at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pa.) writes about Updike in the light of having watched and enjoyed the Jack Nicholson film, As Good As It Gets. Nothing stuffy here.

James A. Schiff writes that for Updike, "God permeates every aspect of human life so that his presence is felt in and around households. Updike doesn't state his beliefs in so many words, preferring--as most artists--to "suggest that the possibility of there being something greater beneath the physical surface." As Updike wrote in Assorted Prose, "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else."

Schiff sees God presence in Updike's writing, although "beneath the surface, pushing through, as well as above the world, providing light and hope."

If you share an enthusiasm for Updike, be sure to check out editor Yerkes' excellent Web page called "The Centaurian" devoted to Updike.

"John Updike has said that 'religion created Greek literature and died within its embrace.' Another religion may or may not have created Updike's works, but this volume of essays shows that the embrace is long-standing, seductive, many-sided, and by no means moribund. With obvious affection and clarity of vision, these crtics have hugged the Updikean shore very well indeed." Anthony C. Yu, University of Chicago Divinity School.

"From an abundant but contradictiory world as it is, John Updike has in fifty books recorded in prodigious detail 'an intense radiance we do not see.' That underglow is explored in these fifteen thought-provoking essays about the religious dimension of his work. Some essayists protray his themes as Lutheran, Barthian, or Kierkegaardian, but all see this work as a lifelong Pilgrim's Progress, with Updike a pilgrim who is sometimes in motion upwards, but at other times only watches while God moves inexorably toward him." Doris Betts, author of "Souls Raised from the Dead" and "The Sharp Teeth of Love."