While a foremost contemporary American writer of fiction asserts that "the literary artist, to achieve full effectiveness, must assume a religious state of mind" (Updike, p. 239), there is no denying that the novel is a genre of literary art that rarely takes religion as its obvious and principal theme. Among the more prominent twentieth-century theorists of the novel, one viewed it as "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God" (Lukács, p. 88), and another considered it the genre in which "the absolute past" of the gods, demigods, and heroes is "contemporized" and "brought low, represented on a plane equal with contemporary life, in an everyday environment, in the low language of contemporaneity" (Bakhtin, p. 21).

Some books that read like novels do overtly take religion as their theme, but they are better described as works of edification...