Center director John Utz, an adjunct assistant professor at the Divinity School, said well-crafted fiction can show seminarians and other writers how to "express theology in more fluid or lucid ways than some academic work would."

However, at the conference, not every treatment of faith was somber and erudite. During her reading of an unpublished short story called "That Old Time Religion," Kimmel had her audience guffawing at a traditional Southern Baptist woman, whose well-meaning pretensions are stripped away when she ends up competing in a drag contest to win bail money for her husband.

While the authors used faith in different ways, they all concurred with Kimmel's approach to faith in fiction. "I don't go in with a question to address," she said. "I let the characters dictate to me what the issues are."

For his reading, Morgan, a visiting English professor at Duke, drew on his childhood experiences attending Pentecostal services in the mountains of North Carolina.

In the reading, from The Truest Pleasure, a seventeen year-old girl is caught up in a minister's preaching. "I didn't know I was saying anything, even though I felt my tongue move," she thinks as she begins to speak in tongues. "But it felt like I was raising above myself even while I stood still."

Despite growing up in distinct church traditions, all four authors rebelled against their pious upbringings.

"I am a hopeless sinner who falls short of the grace of God everyday," Kimmel recalled telling a dean during her interview for the Quaker Earlham School of Religion. "And I don't really plan to change that."

Edgerton, whose parents once hoped he would become a missionary, said he's now a "Nearist" -- "You know, go to the nearest church."

Morgan describes himself as a "renegade Christian," attracted to Anglican and Lutheran theology.

Kenan sarcastically calls himself an "apostate." He left his family's Baptist church in rural Chinquapin, N.C., in part because of its opposition to his homosexuality. That struggle eventually became the subject of his first novel, A Visitation of Spirits.

Christians can use fiction to better understand their religious beliefs, said third-year divinity student Ryan Smith, who attended the festival with classmates from his Christianity and Contemporary Literature course. "It allows us to see those beliefs embodied in characters, which is important for Christianity because it's incarnational," he said. "It puts flesh on the things we believe and [helps us] see things less abstractly."

Many in the audience were aspiring writers, such as Steve Gilbert of Youngsville, who says he wakes up 4 a.m. to begin writing before going to work and taking care of his family.

Nate Lumpkin, a sophomore at Raleigh Charter High School and self-described "budding writer," skipped school to attend the festival. "I've been exploring my religious beliefs," he said, "and I thought it might be exciting to look to other writers who are more experienced at this."

Divinity student Ulrike Sommermann from Germany was curious to see "if Clyde Edgerton is really as funny as he is in his books."

He was. In a reading from Where Trouble Sleeps, Edgerton had the audience in stitches over a seven-year-old boy's budding comprehension of salvation, as presented by his 1950's, fundamentalist family. It involved "not running away from your mama, not playing with your doody. … And it definitely had to do with Moses, Jesus, Peter, Mary, Zachias, Isaiah, Isaac, God, Joseph, Abraham, David, Adam, Ezekiel, Miriam and not playing in the mud."

"Fiction is the best way to get experience on the cheap," said Utz, paraphrasing Henry James. For divinity students who will likely pastor parishioners through all the complexities of modern life, including grief, doubt and relationship difficulties, "it's a great way to expand their experience."