Entries from Come Sit a While that draw on the words of Frederick Buechner.
Frederick Buechner (1926–2022) was one of the most beloved spiritual writers of the twentieth century — a Presbyterian minister, novelist, and theologian whose prose carried both the ache of honest doubt and the warmth of deep faith. Born in New York City, he suffered a wound early that would shape everything: when Buechner was ten years old, his father walked into the family garage and took his own life. That morning, and the silence that surrounded it for years afterward, became the invisible subtext of his life’s work — the reason he wrote so precisely about grief, beauty, and courage. He was educated at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, and ordained under the mentorship of George Buttrick, one of the great preachers of his era. But Buechner was never quite at home in the institutional church. He wrote twenty-seven books of fiction and nonfiction — including the celebrated Wishful Thinking, The Sacred Journey, and the Bebb novels — and became one of the rare figures who could write theology that novelists wanted to read and novels that theologians could not put down. He spent the last decades of his life writing from a farmhouse in Vermont, close to his family, tending a prose style that C.S. Lewis once called among the finest in the English-speaking world. He died in August 2022 at age ninety-six — a man who had looked at the world’s terrible beauty for nearly a century and still found it worth the looking.
Entries featuring Frederick Buechner
- Beautiful and Terrible (2026-01-07)
Drawn from 1 entries · refreshed July 24, 2026