John Updike has died of lung cancer. One of the great American novelists whose work should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century.

TIME obituary.

Powerline remembrance.

Updike read and was influence by the great Neo-Orthodox theologian Karl Barth. He even once remarked that Barth's theology "at one point in my life, seemed alone to be supporting it [my life]."

Here is an article from Theology Today that can serve as an introduction to Updike and Barth.

"Updike doesn't preach. He tells realistic stories with symbolic and theological overtones that, in effect, invite us to enter the discussion ourselves. Here we are invited to consider the goodness of our relationship with God. God's partnership with us in the covenant of grace disclosed in Christ does not, as has been said, solve our many problems. Yet, within our bloodsoaked world, it does give us a place to stand. Only goodness lives. But it does live. God is God and may be trusted to fill our lives with radiance and the world with joy. "

Here is another introduction to Updike as a Christian novelist with a Barthian perspective.

The novelist John Updike is a Christian, but not a Christian novelist in the sense that his work forces an explicitly Christian message onto the reader. On the contrary, precisely because Updike is a Christian he believes the novelist should portray the human condition with unsparing honesty, expressing his "basic duty to God" in writing "the most truthful and fullest books" he can.1 One therefore looks in vain for clear, morally uplifting, spiritually stirring messages in Updike's fiction. At the same time, a powerful theological dimension can be seen running through his work: subtle but profound, invisible yet constantly present, giving Updike's uninhibited report of the human condition a specifically Christian perspective.

John Updike, R.I.P.