Frederick Buechner (1926–2022)
Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) was an American writer and theologian. He is the author of many books, including novels, collections of essays and sermons, and other nonfiction. Buechner received numerous awards for his work, including the O. Henry Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize (for his novel Brendan). He was also recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. One of his works of historical fiction, Godric (1980), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Buechner’s collections of sermons and his memoirs (in four volumes) are written in a poetic, literary style, with his signature vulnerability and evidence of a deep imagination. Buechner had the honor of giving the Noble Lectures at Harvard in 1969.
Buechner is known and beloved for helping readers to become more aware of the evidence of God’s presence and grace in their daily lives. He writes, “More as a novelist than as a theologian, more concretely than abstractly, I determined to try to describe my own life as evocatively and candidly as I could in the hope that such glimmers of theological truth as I believed I had glimpsed in it would shine through my description more or less on their own. It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if God speaks to us at all in this world, if God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks” (from the introduction to his The Sacred Journey). For more about Buechner, visit The Frederick Buechner Center.