A while ago there was this lunch discussion about teaching intro religious studies classes where we pre-read some short articles of profs from a range of institutions about the subject, and one student who was there liked how one prof taught an entire course around Augustine's "Confessions", bringing in comparative material with each class, to which my dissertation advisor said that would only work with a deep book that (quoting some other prof) "you can think with, not about".
At that, the student said that she tried to think if there was an American book like that, and the only thing she could think of was "Huckleberry Finn," but it wouldn't quite work, and my dissertation advisor suggested "Moby Dick".
When I brought up if there were any memoirs that were that deep, and mentioned how I had recently read a couple where one was deeper than the other (Theodore Parker vs. Orestes Brownson), my dissertation advisor was like, "And Theodore Parker is a good person and an intellectual, but he's no Augustine," and we all talked for a while about the fact that it was novels that are the deep religious genre from the U.S., not non-fiction.
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