“There’s a flaw in human nature, and it’s in all great writing, the tragic flaw... and yet there is the expectation that ultimately it’s going to be okay,” said this beloved author and lay Episcopalian, who described herself as “a writer who is struggling to be a Christian.”

The vocation of healing is a central theme in the acclaimed novel "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese, who writes that doctors "must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound."

"Patients require that one-on-one encounter, the Samaritan function of being a physician," says writer and Stanford Medical School professor Abraham Verghese. "When the physician examines the patient, this is an incredibly important ritual."

The vocation of healing is a central theme in the acclaimed novel "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese, who writes that doctors "must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound."

"Patients require that one-on-one encounter, the Samaritan function of being a physician," says writer and Stanford Medical School professor Abraham Verghese. "I'm convinced that when the physician examines the patient, this is an incredibly important ritual."

Read an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson's latest novel "Home."

Some have called Flannery O'Connor our only great Christian writer, a Catholic from the Deep South who said her subject was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

Forty-five years after her death, how do Flannery O'Connor's views about the South, race, violence, Catholicism, and Christian realism hold up?

Read an excerpt from Marilynne Robinson's latest novel "Home."

Read Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly’s web-only interview with Vincent Lam, a Canadian doctor and writer whose acclaimed first book, BLOODLETTING & MIRACULOUS CURES (Weinstein Books, 2007), was awarded the 2006 Giller Prize for fiction.