From the 1940s through '70s, Graham Greene, Tennessee Williams and John Updike weighed in with high-profile novels and plays that were more nuanced than Lewis' but still featured pastors in dysfunction and disgrace.Other, more positive images of clergy made their way into fiction. But the general impression was that writers didn't much want to write, and readers didn't much want to read, stories about ministers who might actually be a credit to their vocation.

John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, studies contemporary fiction and believes we have cycled into a period of literary "post-secularism," with writers and readers eager to explore spiritual themes and characters that will help them cope with the complexities of 21st-century life.

Lauren Winner, author of the acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, speculates that the trend is partly recovery from the political and televangelist scandals of the late 20th century. But she also thinks there's a longing for old-fashioned, wholesome pastoral nurturing.

Whatever the reason, most bookstores - and not just Christian bookstores - are well stocked with fiction that favorably renders men and women of the cloth.

Here are brief looks at three novelists - Jan Karon, Philip Gulley and Marilynne Robinson - who have achieved fame, fortune and critical respect (critical acclaim, in Ms. Robinson's case) for works that feature sympathetic ministers in small town settings.

At age 50, Jan Karon gave up a flourishing advertising career, moving from Raleigh, N.C., to the North Carolina mountain town of Blowing Rock to follow her dream of writing fiction. For months, nothing she wrote seemed to have much life. She prayed for strength to keep trying.

This was the beginning of Father Tim Kavanagh, protagonist of At Home in Mitford and her other Mitford novels, named after the fictional North Carolina mountain town where he is the Episcopal priest.

There are eight of those novels now, and they have sold more than 20 million copies, earning best-seller status in both Christian and mainstream bookstores. The series concludes with Light from Heaven, which is just out in a hardback edition printing of 1.2 million copies. (Viking Adult, $26.95).

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