Marilynne Robinson

The Weekly Wrap: November 23-29

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The Weekly Wrap: November 23-29

Thanksgiving Reflections of a Bibliophile

We celebrated Thanksgiving in the United States on Thursday. It is often the custom to share for what we are thankful, often at the overladen dinner table! But if I were to share for what I’m thankful for as a bibliophile, no one would get in a word edgewise! So, here’s my chance.

First of all, there are the books themselves! They entertain, capture the imagination, inform, and inspire. They enlarge my world and make it more interesting.

Then there are those who sell them! Almost to the person, booksellers are people who share my booklove and love to serve others by connecting them with books they’ll love. I most admire those who own bookstore–always a challenging financial proposition and a labor of love. I don’t know any rich booksellers.

It’s been a privilege to connect with a number of authors. No matter what I think of their books, I am aware of the arduous work of writing and rewriting and the courage to believe others will be interested in what they’ve written. I’m thankful for the disciplined passion that gives birth to their books.

Then there are the publishers. I’m especially grateful for the small publishers who take the risks to bring new authors to our attention. I think of all the people in publishing houses whose work makes this possible: editors, publicists, graphic designers, marketers, and the administrative people who support the enterprise.

A group I increasingly admire are librarians. They do so much more for their communities than help us borrow the books we want or learn about those we might like. They serve a variety of community needs from job searches to dealing with drug overdoses. Increasingly, they are the front line troops ensuring that the books we want, no matter how controversial for some, are available to read.

Finally, as a “book influencer,” I have the chance to interact with many other booklovers and my life is so rich for it. I’m constantly learning from their insights and book recommendations. And its a joy when I learn a review has helped someone find a book they love. Summing it all up, there is so much for which I’m grateful–and I’ve spared you!

But if only my beloved Buckeyes can break their losing streak today and defeat That Team Up North! Then all will be right in my corner of the world!

Five Articles Worth Reading

“Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf.” Ed Simon explores why this is true of so many of us as bibliophiles in “Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania.”

But what happens to all those books when we die? Kelly Scott Franklin especially explores the fate of all the e-books on our readers as he deals with his mother’s passing. Along the way, he asks profounder questions about our lives, libraries, and literary productions in “The Bad News.”

Meanwhile, literary studies are facing steep cuts in many of our universities. Against that backdrop, Johanna Winant celebrates her experience teaching of close reading through her classroom interactions with appreciative students. She raises important question of what we are in danger of losing in “The Claims of Close Reading.”

The name Czesław Miłosz keeps coming up for me–a signal that I ought to explore his work. This article, “A Quarrel with the World,” piques my interest as it explores his underground work and internment in World War Two and how Communists tried to claim him as one of theirs, necessitating his flight from Poland to France.

Finally, in early November, Marilynne Robinson received the Lewis H. Lapham award from Harpers Magazine. In her brief remarks, she incisively puts the case for the necessary work of maintaining our democracy. You can read her remarks in “‘The Voice of a Free People is Full of Turbulence and Grace.’ Marilynne Robinson Accepts the Lewis H. Lapham Award.“

Quote of the Week

Poet and hymnwriter William Cowper (pronounced as we would pronounce “Cooper”), was born on November 26, 1731. I will leave you with this aphorism, a rhyming couplet:

“They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I finished one of the more profound books this week that I’ve read in some time. Esther Lightcap Meek’s Loving to Know explores what she calls “covenant epistemology” which she frames as a radical alternative to both Cartesian and post-modern epistemologies. She draws heavily on the work of Michael Polanyi to propose a way of leaning that is neither merely objective nor subjective but personal.

I also finished Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his planned trilogy of Revolutionary War books. What most impressed me was that to a significant extent the colonists, and especially Washington, won by avoiding outright defeat, until France could help administer the final coup de grace.

Finally, I am returning to a writer whose work I’ve loved, Tish Harrison Warren. An Anglican priest and former New York Times op-ed writer, she wrote a book a couple years ago, Advent, that a book group I’m a part of is reading. I like her idea of “making Christmas weird, again.”

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: November 2025

Tuesday: Tish Harrison Warren, Advent

Wednesday: Mark R. Glanville, Preaching in a New Key

Thursday: Mark Tabb, Am I a Better Christian on Zoloft?

Friday: David McCullough, Brave Companions

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for November 23-29.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

The Weekly Wrap: March 9-15

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The Dangerous Power of Books

I’ve been thinking a good deal about an article published in Aeon this week, “Dark Books.” Tara Isabella Burton argues that books can unmake or make us. They can disturb or uplift, oppress or liberate.

But how do they do this? It comes down to what happens in the act of reading. When we read, we open our minds, our psyches, ourselves to another. We “drop our guard” to some degree to enter the world of another, and permit them to enter ours.

By and large, we bibliophiles argue for the good of books. The article observes this was not always so. There was a time when commentators warned against novel reading. And sometimes books are freighted with messages oppressive to women, minorities, or others.

I do make choices of what I will and won’t read because of the power of books. It’s not that I cannot think critically about books. It’s just that I realize that, sometimes, the mental images formed by a book can persist. I left off reading one science fiction series because of the graphic descriptions of gruesome violence. I do not read highly sexualized or pornographic material because I want to honor my marriage.

I am not one to say what others should or should not read. I think adults should make their own decisions in this regard and parents with their own children (but not for others). But I believe we may be naive at times about the books (and other media) we let into our lives and how these influence us. Words are powerful things, for good or ill.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Here’s the article I’ve been discussing, “Dark Books.” I was challenged by Burton’s concluding words: “Only by respecting the potential of books to destroy us – terrifying as it might be – can we have an authentic faith in their ability to put us back together again.”

Marilynne Robinson believes Max Weber mischaracterized John Calvin. She has written about Calvin in essays and he comes up in her novels. “The Sum of Our Wisdom” reflects her efforts to recover Calvin for our age.

Some of us are trying to forget the pandemic and others of us are trying to make sense of how it changed us, and our lives. Lily Myers, an Atlantic contributing writer, reviews a number of pandemic novels in “The Novel I’m Searching For.” She previews the article with this statement: “Five years after the pandemic, I’m holding out for a story that doesn’t just describe our experience, but transforms it.”

The New York Times released its non-fiction and fiction spring previews this week. I thought the “21 Nonfiction Books to Read This Spring” had some interesting books, including Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain!

Finally, “Who is better, Dickens or Shakespeare?” The Guardian asked nine writers. To me it seems an apple and oranges comparison.

Quote of the Week

I post many quotes. This one gave me pause:

“People will assign irrational importance to almost anything in quotes on top of a pleasant image”

This comes from Colin Fletcher, a backpacker and travel writer born March 14, 1922.

Miscellaneous Musings

I’m debating whether to buy a copy of Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Meta exec. She has been enjoined by a court to not promote the book due to her severance agreement with Meta. So far, they have not stopped sales of the book. Although I’m not sure what the book could tell me to cause me to have a lower opinion of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

In the grand scheme of things this is a blip, but I’m a Louise Penny fan and was deeply saddened to hear the Canadian author has cancelled her US book tour, including an appearance at the Kennedy Center. She discusses her decision in this CBC story.

Simone Weil in Waiting for God has a wonderful essay on “attention” which she believes is central to the life of prayer. She argues in the essay that practice of all forms of attention, including geometry proofs (!) train us in spiritual attention. Her choice of geometry is interesting, given her inferiority about her geometry skills in comparison to her mathematician brother Andre!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Wallace Stegner, Remembering Laughter

Tuesday: Quentin J. Schultze, Communicating for Life

Wednesday: Frances M. Young, Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute

Thursday: J.R.R. Tolkien, Beren and Luthien

Friday: Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for March 9-15, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Reading Genesis

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Cover image of "Reading Genesis" by Marilynne Robinson

Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (ISBN: 9780374613440), 2024.

Summary: Marilynne Robinson’s interpretation of Genesis, exploring the problem of evil in the world and the goodness of God.

“The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply.”

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson offers in these opening lines not only her perspective on the Bible but the central themes of her reading of Genesis. Though theologically astute, she does not approach Genesis as a theologian but as a coherent narrative–a story. She’s not interested in controversies over creation or flood but in what they reveal of the God of the Bible. Nor is she interested in the efforts of critical scholarship to dissect the book into its component sources. Rather, she offers a reading that considers Genesis as a whole book within our Bibles.

She’s not put off by other ancient creation and flood narratives. Instead she highlights the distinctives of the Genesis narrative. Among those distinctives is the reticence to speak of God’s activity prior to creation. Also, we see the goodness of the creation and the elevated status of humanity. Likewise, the flood is not a story of utter obliteration but of severe mercy in which God recognizes both Noah’s righteousness and what he has made.

Robinson traces the story of human evil throughout Genesis: the fall, the murder of Cain. The boasts of Lamech. The hubris of Babel. Even in the story of Abraham and his descendants, Genesis narrates flawed human beings. Abraham passes off his wife as his sister, sends Hagar and her son into the wilderness. Isaac and Rebecca play favorites with their sons. Jacob practices deception. And Joseph seizes the land of the Egyptians while giving his family choice land in Goshen (an observation by Robinson I’ve not seen elsewhere).

Robinson notes the singular lack of an effort to sanitize this history. It’s “unsanitary” nature is the basis on which she argues the grace of God. God protects Cain rather than kills him. Despite Abraham’s failures, God makes extravagant promises that Abraham believes and God hears Hagar, and makes of her son a great nation as well.

And the family begins to imitate the mercies and generosity of God. Jacob recognizes the justice of his brother’s grievance and seeks to make what amends he can and the brothers embrace. A cautious rapprochement to be sure but better than the threatened vengeance. And the brother with the greatest cause for vengeance most freely forgives. Joseph offers home and help (after testing) to brothers who sold him into slavery.

I was most interested in the episode of the binding of Isaac. Robinson focuses on the episode’s clear ban on child sacrifice, in contrast to the surrounding nations. I appreciate that she notes the parallels with the sending of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. Yet I wonder, as does Richard Middleton, how well does Abraham do on the test. He obeys implicitly. But might God have wanted more from “the father of nations”? Why does Abraham not intercede, as he did for his nephew Lot and evil Sodom? Why doesn’t he say, “take me instead of your son, that your promise might be fulfilled in him”? Nor does Robinson explore the consequences for Isaac, for the relationship between him and his father (they live apart afterward) and for Sarah. As a storyteller, I found her discussion of this incident incomplete at best.

That said, the book is an invitation for us to read Genesis with Robinson. Marilynne Robinson’s interpretation of Genesis, interesting as it is, is not as important as encountering the story for ourselves. To help with that, the book includes the text of the King James Version (KJV) of Genesis. I don’t know the reason for this choice of version other than the stateliness of the language and the fact that the KJV is in the public domain. For most readers new to this text, I would recommend reading it in a contemporary translation, perhaps the New Revised Standard Version or the New International Version.

Regardless, rather than arguing about the science or versions or historicity of the book, Robinson invites us to explore this story, of God’s dealings with humanity at their occasional best and more typically worst. Instead of remaining aloof, God wades into the mess, laying the groundwork for redemption.

[One minor quibble. The cover design makes it difficult to read the title and author of the book either on physical copies or with digital images like that above. My bookseller searched and searched the section where the book was supposed to be before finally locating it.]

Review: Absence of Mind

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Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Summary: The text of Robinson’s 2010 Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy, challenging “parascientific” explanations reducing the mind to nothing more than the physical brain.

The idea of the mind has been under assault from those who would contend our “minds” are nothing more than the physical processes making up the extensive neural network of our brains. In this collection of four essays, the text of Marilynne Robinson’s 2010 Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy, she challenges this notion. She does not oppose the work of neuroscientists, but rather those like Daniel Dennett, who in the garb of science, make metaphysical conclusions about the existence of the mind, or rather the absence of such apart from the physical substrate of the brain. She calls this “parascience,” an intellectual argument operating alongside and apart from real scientific research.

Her first essay “On Human Nature” notes the modern assumption of a threshold, before which explanations of human nature were benighted, compared to the enlightened explanations of the likes of Bertrand Russell and Daniel Dennett, who “explain away” the mind and traditional religion.

“The Strange History of Altruism” challenges the assumption that evolutionary forces protecting gene pools explain altruistic behavior and the disregard of counterfactual evidence.

The third essay, “The Freudian Self,” takes on the suspicion of the mind in Freud, that the mind is not to be trusted due to subconscious processes. She looks at the intellectual milieu surrounding Freud and how this shaped his ideas.

The final essay, “Thinking Again,” celebrates our sense of self-awareness, that mechanistic explanations dismiss. She writes in introducing her discussion:

“Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word ‘I’ and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and thought. For the religious, the sense of the soul may have as a final redoubt, not as an argument but as experience, that haunting I who wakes in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer to so diligently” (p. 110).

Each of these essays are densely argued, invoking the various shapers of the modern mind, challenging the “authorities” who reduce mind to materialistic explanations.

Essentially, Robinson is saying, “not so fast.” At the same time, her argument also has a bit of a feel of a “mind of the gaps,” the mind not yet explained by physical processes. I would not want to see another version of the evolution-creation battle of the last 150 years in the field of neuroscience. Might there be an approach of humility, of genuine listening that refuses to dismiss both the powerful experience of our self-awareness, our consciousness, and the powerful advances of neuroscience in understanding the physical substrates of many of our “mental experiences”? Physical explanations of other phenomena have only increased for believing persons their joy in the Creator. Could not more holistic physical explanations of the mind also increase our wonder, even as we understand how that wonder is wired into us?

Robinson challenges the reductionistic materialism of parascience. I would also want her to speak against the denials of real advances in scientific understanding. I hope we can develop both a robust materiality and a robust spirituality, neither of which are at war with the other. Perhaps what we need is a sequel to these lectures titled “Presence of Mind,” for it seems that this is what we require in the present time.

Some Writers I Just Can’t Ignore

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“A New Harvest, With Wendell Berry, Henry County, KY” by Guy Mendes is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

James T. Keane, in a current America article titled “Wendell Berry: the cranky farmer, poet, and essayist you just can’t ignore,” asks this question:

“My reaction was a simple one: Did Wendell Berry just leap off the page and hit me over the head with a fencepost?”

Wendell Berry is one of those writers I can’t ignore. I recently read and reviewed his The Hidden Wound, is a profound essay on racism, written, not in 2018 but 50 years earlier in 1968. Berry seems to speak from somewhere else with a voice unlike other voices, and it got me to thinking who some of the other writers are who have spoken from somewhere else with a voice I cannot ignore. Here are some I came up with:

Marilynne Robinson. Her essays and novels, steeped in, of all things, Calvinism, challenge both modern scientism and our easy moral equivocation and dismissal of the relevance of God. I’m reading her lectures at Yale in 2010 right now, Absence of Mind.

C.S. Lewis. He brought his love and encyclopedic knowledge of old books and Christian theology to the questions of the day as well as in children’s literature in a way both timely and timeless.

Kristin Hannah. This is an author who keeps me awake at night, after I put her books down, with her strong female characters confronting personal and systemic inhumanity, often at the hands of men. They make me as a man want to fight against the wrongs done to subjugate women.

Eugene Peterson. I heard Peterson speak to the staff of the organization I work for after a hugely successful conference, warning of the dangers of believing too much in our success. He wrote trenchantly during his life on the calling of pastors, and how he saw many exchanging noble for ignoble work. He ought to be assigned reading for all our celebrity pastors.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I may not believe all he would say theologically, but I cannot ignore words that come out of resistance to totalitarianism and his experience of leading a Christian community of resistance.

Mary Oliver. I’ve only come to discover her poetry in the last few years, but her perception of the transcendent in the ordinary, the large issues of life in small incidents nudge me to be aware of the same.

Nicholas Wolterstorff. Wolterstorff is a philosopher who teaches at Yale. Whether writing about the death of a son, justice in South Africa, philosophy of education, or his defense of religious ideas in scholarly discussion, he brings head and heart, reason and passion together. Read his memoir In This World of Wonders and his “Advice to Those Who Would Be Christian Scholars.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading his sermons and speeches is like a trumpet call. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a powerful response to the moderate white pastors who counselled patience.

Fleming Rutledge. Anyone who would argue that women cannot preach or teach theology should read her work. Her The Crucifixion is the most significant theological work I have read in the past ten years. Three Hours is preached reflections on the seven last words of Christ. Advent is also quite good.

I don’t know about you, but in a world of amusement, distraction, and obliviousness, I need to be “hit over the head with a fencepost.” This is part of the company of writers who serve that function for me. These are writers who do not so much answer my questions, as question my answers. Who does that for you?

Review: Reimagining Apologetics

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Reimagining Apologetics, Justin Ariel Bailey. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020.

Summary: A case for an apologetics appealing to beauty and to the imagination that points toward a better picture of what life might be.

When most of us hear the term “apologetics,” we think of reasoned argument for why one should believe, indeed, reason that compels belief. Yet in this age of epistemic uncertainty, such argument often elicits suspicion and may turn people ways from faith rather than remove obstacles to it.

Justin Ariel Bailey doesn’t dismiss the value of this traditional approach to apologetics, which he calls “Uppercase apologetics.” What he proposes instead is that some may be drawn to consider Christian faith through the imaginative, the telling of a better story or the painting of a better picture of an authentic Christian life makes better sense of the human condition. He frames it this way:

“By reimagining apologetics, I mean simply an approach that takes the imaginative context of belief seriously. Such an approach prepares the way for Christian faith by provoking desire, exploring possibility, and casting an inhabitable Christian vision. When successful, it enables outsiders to inhabit the Christian faith as if from the inside, feeling their way in before attempting to criticize it by foreign standards. Whether a person ultimately embraces the vision that is being portrayed, imaginative engagement cultivates empathy. It enables a glimpse, even if just for a moment, of the possibilities that Christian faith facilitates for our life in the world.”

Justin Ariel Bailey, p. 4.

The book is broken into two parts. The first is more philosophical in elaborating the relationship of apologetics and the imagination. Bailey begins with the work of Charles Taylor, and the disenchantment of the modern world under secularity. He treats secularity as a crisis of the imagination that reasoned argument alone cannot address. He then turns to Schleiermacher as a pioneer of an imaginative apologetic that sought to “feel our way in,” albeit at the expense of a connection to truth. Bailey argues that such an approach with a thicker theological ground is possible. He then deals more properly with the nature of imagination itself and how it is shaped by creation, fall, and redemption.

The second part then considers two writers, George MacDonald of the Victorian era, and Marilynne Robinson of our own, and how their writing models imaginative approaches to Christian faith in the face of the Victorian “crisis of faith” and the contemporary “new atheism.” MacDonald wrote his works with his friend John Ruskin in mind. Using the Wingfold trilogy, he shows how MacDonald sought to awaken his readers to a vision of virtue leading to a vision of God and his world. Bailey sees Robinson revealing a capacious vision of authentic Christian life in her characters. Then he looks at the Calvinism of both writers that sees the world filled with the presence of God that makes sense of our homesickness for God.

Bailey concludes with identifying three elements of an apologetic of the imagination:

  1. Sensing. Imagination as an aesthetic sense and gives primacy to the aesthetic dimension.
  2. Seeing. Imagination as orienting vision that invites exploration of a more capacious vision of the world
  3. Shaping. Imagination as poetic vision that situates the human project within the larger redemptive project of God.

He points to Makoto Fujimura’s idea of “culture care” as a model for how this apologetic may work in commending the faith through appealing to beauty, for seeing this care for beauty in every aspect of life, and reflective of the creative and redeeming beauty of God.

I believe Bailey is onto something. I think of the power of stories like Narnia Tales, or in the case of C.S. Lewis, the fiction of George MacDonald to capture the imagination and open it up to Christ. What does this mean for the apologist? Here, Bailey’s book is only suggestive and needs a follow up. It doesn’t mean buying everyone copies of MacDonald’s and Robinson’s works. At the very end he points to the work of understanding the stories of others and relating our stories to those. I also think, when people are ready, that the narratives of the gospels are also powerful stories, where we allow people to situate their stories within the Jesus story. I hope Bailey will do further work in this area, offering believing people more help in telling their stories and the story. What this work has done is offer the grounds for that work.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Jack

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Jack, Marilynne Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Summary: The story of an inter-racial love affair between Jack Ames Boughton and Della Miles, and Jack’s struggle to find grace.

We first met Jack Ames Boughton and his then-common-law wife Della Miles and their son Robert in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. They flee to Gilead, hoping to find refuge in an era where inter-racial marriage was not merely disapproved of but illegal. Jack, a minister’s son always has lived under a cloud–a petty thief who had impregnated and then abandoned a young woman who fled to Chicago.

Jack picks up the story after that episode and narrates the story of the forbidden love that grew between Jack and Della. After a stint in prison for a theft he hadn’t committed, he returns to St. Louis where he encounters Della when he retrieves school papers that slip out of her grasp in a rainstorm. They develop a deeper relationship after improbably spending a night locked inside a cemetery–a long night of conversation, a relationship knit together by a common love of literature. She knows something of his questionable background, seeing the debt-collectors that dog his tracks, the scar on his cheek that hadn’t been there before.

That is hardly the only impediment they face. Della Miles is the daughter of a bishop in father’s denomination–a group committed to black separatism, an effort to achieve respectable lives without outside help from whites. She is a high school teacher, a respectable position. An affair with a white man is illegal, threatens her job, and faces the staunch disapproval of her family.

Jack wrestles with the tension between reforming his life, working as a shoe salesman and dance partner rather than turning back to his old ways. He struggles between breaking off the affair and his attraction to her, which she returns until they become lovers.

He lives under the cloud of his apostate life as a “son of perdition” who longs for grace but doesn’t believe it is possible, and who messes up everything he touches. His brother Teddy maintains the tenuous tie with his family, leaving envelopes of money for a brother who never quite seems to be able to make it on his own. This “grace” only seems to remind him of all the ways his life has been a disappointment. Della represents a longed-for love, but for Jack it is never simple. This love brings further heartbreak, yet seems preferable to attempting to reform one’s life alone.

Robinson offers a story that doesn’t neatly tie up all the loose threads. We long for Jack to sort out his life without Della. Then we long for a wonderful story of racial reconciliation. None of that happens. The choices of love, of finding grace for these two are complicated. We’ve known people for whom life has gone hard, despite their deepest desires otherwise. Jack gives us an unsettling narrative, framed in the Jim Crow South, exploring an old theme of forbidden love.

Review: Balm in Gilead

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balm in gilead

Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, edited by Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019.

Summary: A collection of presentations from the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, discussing the work, and particularly the fiction, of Marilynne Robinson with contributions from Robinson.

It is not unusual at an academic conference to discuss the work of a particular author. What is perhaps more remarkable is to discuss the work of a living author with the author present and contributing. The subtitle of this work calls this “a theological dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, and this is true in two senses. The various essays do engage the theology, particularly the Calvinism of Robinson’s work. But the conference also engaged Robinson, with a presentation by her (“The Protestant Conscience”) and a conversation between her and Rowan Williams, and an interview with Wheaton College President Philip Ryken.

Most of the essays focus on some aspect of the theology found in Robinson’s work. Timothy Larsen considers the main character of her fiction, Reverend John Ames, his heritage as the grandson of a staunch abolitionist in the mold of Wheaton’s Jonathan Blanchard, his reaction against that as a pacifist, and the mindset of the 1950’s Christian Century which he and fellow minister Boughton regularly discussed. Han-luen Kantzer Komline explores Ames “heart condition,” both physical and spiritual, and his struggle to forgive and extend grace to Jack Boughton, the wayward child of his friend. Timothy George explores the unusual, for an academic and a writer, embrace of Calvinism by Robinson, with its doctrine of predestination, emphasizing grace and undercutting human presumption. George notes the central focus of Robinson on Christ and so does Keith L. Johnson in a discussion of Robinson’s metaphysics. Here he teases out Robinson’s understanding of the significance of the cross as the demonstration of the love of God for us rather than on its sacrificial character, a focus Robinson engages and differs with.

Lauren Winner focuses on the preaching of John Ames–the 67,500 pages and 2,250 sermons in the course of his pastorate in Gilead and his conclusion that “they mattered or they didn’t and that’s the end of it.” One of the most intriguing essays for me was that of Patricia Andujo on the African American experience in Robinson’s works. She explores how these works reflect the attitudes of mainline white churches in the 1950’s, a kind of passivity in the face of racism, even while raising the uncomfortable issue of Jack Boughton’s inter-racial marriage, and the lack of response when the town’s black church burns down and the congregation leaves.

Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s essay on “Space/Time/Doctrine” raises the intriguing idea of the influence of Robinson’s understanding of predestination, and the shifts backwards and forwards in time in her novels. Joel Sheesley, a midwestern artist, focuses on the landscape of Robinson’s novels. In the penultimate essay Rowan Williams explores the theme of the grace that is beyond human goodness. He writes:

“Grace, not goodness, is the key to our healing. To say that is to say that we’re healed in relation not only to God but to one another. Without that dimension, we’re back with toxic goodness again, the goodness that forgets and excludes. Lila’s problem in the novel is that the instinctive warmth, the human friendliness, the humanly constructed fellowship that characterizes Gilead cannot allow itself to be wounded and broken open in such a way that the stranger is welcome, whether that stranger is the racial other, or simply the socially marginal and damaged person like Lila herself. But to be wounded in our goodness, to learn to have that dimension of our self-image and self-presentation cracked open, is the beginning of where grace can act in us” (pp. 163-164).

The final essay is Robinson’s on “The Protestant Conscience,” in which she defends not only the freedom of conscience of religious believers but argues that the Protestant idea of conscience defended the freedom of all rather than enforcing a Christian conscience upon all through means of the state. This presentation is followed by conversations with Rowan Williams, and an interview with Philip Ryken. In this collection, I found these diverting, but not nearly as substantive and satisfying as the various essays. Perhaps a highlight was the difference between Robinson and Williams on the literary merits of Flannery O’Connor, of whom Robinson is no fan.

This is a great volume for any who, like me, love the work of Marilynne Robinson. It helped make greater sense of some of the themes I’ve seen in her work, particularly her Calvinism. It served to invite me to a re-reading of her work in its exploration of themes of place, race, and grace. Robinson’s presence by no means muted the critique of her work, and yet I saw no defensiveness in her comments, which bespeaks the evidence of grace in her life. All in all, this is well worth acquiring if you have followed Robinson’s work. For those who have not, read the novels first, and then you will appreciate this volume!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Givenness of Things

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The givenness of things

The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson. New York: Picador, 2016.

Summary: A collection of essays drawn from various lectures questioning our prevailing ideas through the lens of John Calvin, and others in the Reformed and Humanist tradition.

If you have read Marilynne Robinson’s fiction, you have the sense that there is a world of theological thought undergirding her narratives, particularly reflected in her lead character, Reverend John Ames. To read her essays is to enter into that rich theological world, and the extent to which this woman reads.

It is also to experience a voice that seems from another time, questioning our prevailing ways of thought. Like C. S. Lewis, Robinson is a reader of old books, particularly old theologians like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards, and she allows these voices of another time to question our accepted ways of looking at things.

One example is the essay from which the title of this collection is drawn, “Givenness.” The essay focuses around the ideas of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections and the intrinsic character of the affections of love, joy, hope, desire, and others in our experience of faith. Here, and in other essays, she argues against the scientific reductionism that reduces the affections to the firing of neurons. Similarly, the opening essay on “Humanism” describes the glories of the works of the mind that came out of the Renaissance, and challenges the reductionism that would explain all of this through evolutionary mechanisms and physical processes. It is not that she is anti-science. It is obvious that her reading includes and delights in a great deal of science writing. It is the scientism that asserts hegemony over all domains of human experience to which she objects.

The book consists of seventeen essays, most with one word titles like “Reformation,” Servanthood,” or “Limitation.” Perhaps the most striking for me was her essay on  “Fear.” These statements were particularly arresting:

“First, contemporary America is full of fear. And second, fear is not a Christian habit of mind….As Christians we are to believe that we are to fear not the death of our bodies but the loss of our souls” (p. 125).

She explores how this drives the fearful nationalism evident even when she was writing these essays, and the stress on preserving and extending the Second Amendment in the acquisition and proposed “right” to concealed carry. She also wonders about the financial interests exploiting this culture of fear.

Her essay on “Theology” explores not only theologians like Jonathan Edwards, but the theological content of the plays of William Shakespeare (whetting my appetite to read some Shakespeare). She explores particularly the ways Shakespeare handles reconciliation and matters of mercy, grace, and forgiveness.

These are simply tastes of what you will find in this rich collection representing Robinson’s thought. Prepare to read rigorously, and to explore the intellectual by-paths Robinson will take in exploring an idea. One must pay close attention to follow the thread of her arguments. Again, like Lewis, one has the sense that she brings everything she has read to anything that she says.

Finally, the book concludes with a two-part conversation with Barack Obama while he was president. As much as anything, he is interviewing her and what a delight to listen in on this wide-ranging conversation between two literate persons. One of the moments that reflected one of the president’s deep regrets was his struggle to close the gap between Washington and Main Street, the ways we engage with each other in everyday life, and the distance between that and our political discourse–our compassion toward the needy near us and our fears of “them” — a comment evoked by Robinson’s essay on fear.

One might critique her essays as reflecting a very Euro-American focus and a lack of engagement with writers outside the Western theological, philosophical and literary canon. There may well be some validity in that critique, but perhaps she is doing something very similar to those calling for other voices, in drawing on voices no longer a part of our cultural discourse, and who speak to our contemporary ideas from another perspective, and from another time.

 

Review: What Are We Doing Here?

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What are we doing here

What Are We Doing Here?, Marilynne Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Summary: A collection of essays based on talks given, mostly at universities, between 2015 and 2017, questioning what she sees as a surrender of thought to ideology.

“I know it is conventional to say we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite–in essential ways we share false assumptions and flawed conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared” (Preface, p. ix).

The thread that connects these essays, mostly transcriptions of talks given at universities (I was present for and blogged about one of these, here presented as “The Beautiful Changes”) is that in much of our intellectual discourse, we have “surrendered thought to ideology.” We unthinkingly tout maxims from Marxism or Darwinism, often without real acquaintance with Marx or Darwin. We speak critically about Puritans, Oliver Cromwell, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards without a real appreciation of what they thought and wrote (apart from a brief excerpt of one sermon of Edwards), and the culture they helped shape. She introduces this theme in her opening essay, on freedom of conscience, maintaining that we have Cromwell and the much-maligned New England Puritans to thank for the idea of freedom of conscience, in contrast to the Anglican controlled South that enforced uniformity of worship and upheld slavery.

In the second and title essay, she pushes back against the much touted demise of the humanities, asking “what are we doing here, we professors of English?” She argues for the recovery of a discourse about the beautiful in an economy that tries to monetize everything, and that we do so with depth and eloquence. In the next essay, on theology, she contends for a recovery of a concept of Being, recognizing both the greatness of God and the greatness of human beings. She goes on to challenge the modern assumption that we are simply thinking animals with Edwards conception of us as capable moral agents. She questions the eclipse of the terminology of the divine and what is lost in our discourse in consequence. She explores Emerson’s idea of the “American scholar” and the very different idea of university education’s end–monetized and measured by its ability to propel a new generation into a cultural elite.

The next three essays explore further the ideas of beauty. Both “Grace and Beauty” and “The Beautiful Changes” argue for a kind of divine freedom that precedes reality and that the ordered grandeur and elegance seen by both scientists and theologians bespeak the grace of God. Between these two essays is a tribute to a different kind of beauty and comes out of the personal friendship Robinson enjoyed with Barack Obama. She writes,

“There is a beauty at the center of American culture which, when it is understood, is expressed in a characteristic eloquence. Every new articulation renews the present life of the country and enriches historic memory to the benefit of future generations. Barack Obama speaks this language, a rare gift. He is ours, in the deep sense that Lincoln is ours, a proof, a test, and an instruction. We see ourselves in him, and in him we embrace or reject what we are” (p. 125).

The longest essay, “Our Public Conversation” is a sprawling reflection on America’s conversation about itself, and particularly its history, which in Robinson’s estimation, it often gets wrong. Here again, her example is the Puritans, and how in fact the rights we so cherish arose out of Puritan culture, rather than in spite of it.

The latter part of the work focuses on questions of character–our conceptions of mind, conscience and soul; the theological virtues of faith, hope and love; integrity in our modern intellectual tradition, the richness of intellectual and moral life of the New England Puritans (yes, those Puritans again!), and finally a challenging and convicting essay on slander and the scriptural warnings against every careless word. If everyone engaged in public discourse could read and take this to heart, it would turn out public discourse upside down!

Robinson is one of those you need to read closely and more than once as her mind ranges widely with rich use of allusion and metaphor while exploring a chosen theme. When I didn’t, I lost the thread of her argument. It is also true that in this collection, Robinson belabors her defense of the Puritans (although essay collections often recur to their author’s favorite themes). At the same time, one finds a forthrightness in challenging unthinking assumptions, including those of her fellow Christians, who wonder if she is fearful about her open portrayal of religious themes in her novels and other works. Her response is that she has always written what she is interested in, and simply is glad there is an audience that has also found it of interest.

Perhaps Robinson’s love of the Puritans and the intellectual rigor she finds in Calvinism offers her a unique point of view in her critique of American intellectual culture. As C. S. Lewis has argued in his case for reading old books, two sides may be “as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united — united with each other and against earlier and later ages — by a great mass of common assumptions.” Reading books from a different age, in this case the Puritans, and other great theologians of the church, may give Robinson that ability to spot those common assumptions–the ideologies we unthinkingly embrace that substitute for thought, that foster our disagreements and stifle our public discourse and intellectual life. We may delight in pointing out the flaws in the Puritans but do we let them speak to ours? This is what I believe is implied as Robinson asks, “what are we doing here?”