The threat of death as a test for theological authenticity

Right from the first lines of the 1965 novel Stoner, its author, John Williams, unemotionally informs the reader that William Stoner was a plain and inconspicuous character:  he entered the University of Missouri in 1910, he taught there until his death in 1956 and today, ‘to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers’.1