Speaking in the narthex bookshop as Updike diligently signed books following the talk's conclusion, the Rev. J. Christopher King, associate rector of St. Bart's, mentioned the passage from RABBIT, RUN as the evening's most gripping excerpt for him. "I couldn't help but hear Kruppenbach addressed to me," he said. "He's talking about a certain kind of formation where we're led to think of ourselves as fixer-uppers. If it happened to me I think I'd behave very much like Eccles. The reason Eccles is angry is because he knows the truth has been spoken to him."

Offering his lifelong "tour of Protestantism" as the tongue-in-cheek reason he could address an audience on the topic of religion, Updike explained that he had been raised Lutheran in Pennsylvania, the grandson of a Presbyterian minister. He said he joined a Congregational church with his first wife, the daughter of a Unitarian minister, "as a good midway point between our sects." Since marrying his second wife in 1977, he has worshipped as an Episcopalian. For good measure, Updike added, to much laughter from those listening, that his first girlfriend was the daughter of a Methodist chaplain.

Updike's studies of theology and Scripture have led him to form strong opinions, though he remains reluctant to position himself as an authority on anything except his own oeuvre. Asked which of the Gospels was his favorite, he answered, without even a beat to reflect, that he liked Luke's stories the best, but trusted Mark "as the earliest and least prone to wishful thinking." Updike paused for a moment. "It's also the shortest," he said, before critiquing Matthew as legalistic and "the most full of hellfire," and John as "almost too much of a Platonic philosophy."

Responding to a question submitted from the audience on whether orthodox Christian theology's invocation to accept God's will runs counter to progressive politics, Updike concluded, "I think there is a quietism, at least in the Lutheran faith, that you can see in Luther's own life.

"Yes, I think to a certain degree it mitigates against trying to change the world, instead trying to find a peaceful, satisfactory place within the world that exists," he said. "It is consoling to think that if not every detail is the will of God, there is a kind of will bigger than your own. You can't change everything. You have to accept the world as it is."

Introducing a poem from the 1950s, "Burning Trash," he called wonderment at one's own existence and that of the world "one of the seeds of religious consciousness," offering the fear of death as the other. After describing the poem as an attempt to convey "the sense of being suspended in space, in an endless darkness," Updike mused that "maybe when you're young is the time to think about your death." For a man famously averse to expounding on himself in interviews, who once said that "when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep," the comment suggested that now, at age 72, he prefers to console himself in the "safe harbor" of his faith.

Benedicta Cipolla is a writer in New York City.