Frederick Buechner is the successful author of six published novels (A Long Day's Dying, The Return of Ansel Gibbs, Lion Country) who lives in Vermont with his wife and three children. He is also a graduate of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary (1958), an ordained Presbyterian minister and the former chaplain to the young men of Phillips Exeter Academy. As it turns out, that combination makes him an off-the-cuff theologian of considerable panache, a talent that he demonstrates in a beguiling new book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row; $4.95).
Buechner ("It is pronounced Beek-ner," he explains in a delightful...