Thank You, John Updike

John Updike’s recent death took me back to the early 1970s and McGill University where I studied religion. The Rabbit books were big and Couples had explored the age’s new attitudes regarding sexuality.

It seemed to me that Mr. Updike was at heart a neo-orthodox Protestant, a critic of the innate depravity of the human condition. (For example, Couples was set in the aptly named town of Tarbox.)

As an aspiring Unitarian minister I silently dialogued with his literary jabs at my liberal religious tradition, with which Mr. Updike had considerable familiarity. His wife was the daughter of a prominent Unitarian minister.

Although I thoroughly disagree with a negative neo-orthodox appraisal of the human condition, I’m eternally grateful for Mr. Updike’s writing that so contributed to the development of my own worldview. I often think that his works offer the most important critical appraisal of the latter decades of twentieth century American culture.