Biographies and memoirs have been real literary sustenance for me since before I can remember. Frederick Buechner's memoirs have been some of the most important to me. His trillogy of the first three, THE SACRED JOURNEY, NOW AND THEN and TELLING SECRETS, covering childhood to middle-age, have helped and comforted me more than I can say. In NOW AND THEN he describes his conversion to Christianity and his decision to become a Prebyterian minister. Buechner was raised unchurched and he felt he needed seminary to understand the Faith. He was a survivor. His father had committed suicide and he had no real context for that before his conversion. Before enrolling in seminary, Buechner studied to become a novelist and he speaks here of his early writing career, the education that that required, and his need to integrate the literary with his new Christian perspective. For some reason, NOW AND THEN is probably the narrative you see least from the first three Buechner memoirs. It's a very interesting view of religious education from a mature man of 27. I sometimes wish I'd gone to school at that age, especially after reading an account like this.

Buechner is now in his eighties, he has retired from writing but his estate is now bringing out repackaged editions of his work.

"...here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation, usually hidden, but sometimes manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ"

Here Buechner quotes his instructor Paul Tillich's Book, THE NEW BEING. In NOW AND THEN, he is able to make his teachers at Union Theological Seminary come alive in their faith, thought and doubt. All of the Now and Then of the people who supported my own conversion came back to me with love and appreciation as I read this.

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