We lost a great writer Friday night when David Foster Wallace, known to fans as DFW, passed away, apparently by suicide.

Though he professed to be an admirer of John Donne’s poetry and Kierkegaard’s philosophy, Wallace was not known to be religious. Likewise, in his essays, short stories and novels he rarely addressed religion overtly.

In one of his few stories centered on religion, “Good People,” Wallace is at his empathetic best, as he gets inside the head of a young Christian encountering a moral dilemma. My favorite Wallace short story, though, has to be “Forever Overhead,” which imagines a boy on his 13th birthday on a diving board. That title might be an apt one for all of DFW’s work, which was often intellectually challenging but always full of heart.

Wallace will be missed.