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What Are We Doing Here?
New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”
336 pages, Hardcover
First published February 20, 2018
About the author
Marilynne Robinson
48 books5,236 followersAmerican novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 196 reviews
February 21, 2018
This is not a lightweight read, as Robinson is an academic first, one who happens to write novels. Most of these essays are speeches Robinson gave at universities between 2015 and 2017, on themes of religion, politics, holiness, humanism, etc. She was clearly on a John Edwards, Calvinism, and Cromwell kick because several of the essays reference these characters, as well as looking at the true history of America and its "Puritan roots." While I believe Robinson understands something deep about humanity, I personally prefer the experience of her perspective of it in her fiction than in her essays, but there was is one favorite that I feel everyone should read, one that I luckily found myself reading on Presidents' Day. It's called "A Proof, a Test, an Instruction," and looks at Obama's presidency from a different perspective. It can be a balm for people weary of 45. I also think it's interesting to note that it is one of the few written for print rather than a speech, and I think it is in more of a type of essay I enjoy reading - it has more personal reflection to balance the scholarship and points she is trying to make than the rest of them.
So this won't be for everyone, but if you are interested in religion and theology, in examining current events through a historical Calvinist lens, or want to delve deep into her thinking, this will be the book for you. I saw her speak a few years ago at the university where I work, and her quiet command of her topics is really something.
Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this title through Edelweiss. It came out today, February 20th, 2018.
So this won't be for everyone, but if you are interested in religion and theology, in examining current events through a historical Calvinist lens, or want to delve deep into her thinking, this will be the book for you. I saw her speak a few years ago at the university where I work, and her quiet command of her topics is really something.
Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this title through Edelweiss. It came out today, February 20th, 2018.
April 4, 2024
My favorite (self-described) biblicist, Calvinist, Edwards-and-Puritan-reputations-rehabilitating, America-and-humanities-and-Western-tradition-defending, mainline Protestant, United Church of Christ liberal.
Robinson is like no other writer I know. I've never seen a more wickedly incisive takedown of reductive materialism. I've never read a better defense of the Puritans, not even from their more direct theological heirs. I've never enjoyed so much having my own political proclivities questioned from the Bible (Robinson is at her best when reminding Christians of their duties to the poor—I need to hear this). I rarely read any writer so steeped in Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin, even in my own Calvinistic tribe.
Robinson does speak out of both sides of her theological mouth on at least two important issues in this collection: 1) what she calls "marriage equality" and 2) universalism. This is odd, because she's such a careful and sensitive and literary reader. She's able to say (here I paraphrase from memory), "Jesus specifically condemned" a given sin and then quote the Gospels accurately. She frequently quotes the Bible, and not just the bits that are popular in mainline Protestantism but bits you could only know if you actually read the Bible. She also has written, in a previous essay collection, a pretty stalwart and exegetically/theologically attentive defense of the OT's picture of God. She also, in this essay collection, eviscerates the tendency moderns have to separate the God of the Old Testament from the Jesus of the New. She quotes Paul in Romans 1 at some length, as well she should, in condemnation of the sins of Fox News: gossip, malice, etc. So I'm at a loss—and I've now read three of her essay collections and three of her novels—as to where her critical reading skills have gone when she affirms the morality of homosexual practice and, very briefly, affirms universalism (if I read her right). The Bible speaks clearly and definitively to these issues. All of the Christian writers of the past whom she admires would have read the Bible in just the way I do. One may disagree with the Bible, of course: God permits us that freedom in this age. But that's not Ms. Robinson's M.O. She actually affirms "the authority" (her word) of the Bible explicitly in this book. I don't understand, and I wish to.
But Robinson's strengths are so strong that, even when I don't agree or am not sure I agree, I profit. Her prose style is clear but demanding—in a way that confers respect upon her readers. Ironically, it is this arch liberal, a friend of Barack Obama, who has done more to make me feel proud to be an American than anything I've read in forever. She makes me thankful for my cultural heritage, a culture whose egalitarianism made it possible for a little girl in Idaho to be given the kind of rigorous education that turns her into a Marilynne Robinson.
To fellow evangelical Christians I say: read Robinson for her critiques of scientism and Darwinism and materialism; read her for her rich understanding of your own tradition as found in Puritans both English and American. Read her for careful insights into Scripture, despite and because of their liberal source. Stick around for her critiques of capitalism and Republican ideology; we need to hear them. And then just enjoy the sheer pleasure of reading someone who is so smart.
(Listened through a second time in 2024. Will probably do it again.)
Robinson is like no other writer I know. I've never seen a more wickedly incisive takedown of reductive materialism. I've never read a better defense of the Puritans, not even from their more direct theological heirs. I've never enjoyed so much having my own political proclivities questioned from the Bible (Robinson is at her best when reminding Christians of their duties to the poor—I need to hear this). I rarely read any writer so steeped in Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin, even in my own Calvinistic tribe.
Robinson does speak out of both sides of her theological mouth on at least two important issues in this collection: 1) what she calls "marriage equality" and 2) universalism. This is odd, because she's such a careful and sensitive and literary reader. She's able to say (here I paraphrase from memory), "Jesus specifically condemned" a given sin and then quote the Gospels accurately. She frequently quotes the Bible, and not just the bits that are popular in mainline Protestantism but bits you could only know if you actually read the Bible. She also has written, in a previous essay collection, a pretty stalwart and exegetically/theologically attentive defense of the OT's picture of God. She also, in this essay collection, eviscerates the tendency moderns have to separate the God of the Old Testament from the Jesus of the New. She quotes Paul in Romans 1 at some length, as well she should, in condemnation of the sins of Fox News: gossip, malice, etc. So I'm at a loss—and I've now read three of her essay collections and three of her novels—as to where her critical reading skills have gone when she affirms the morality of homosexual practice and, very briefly, affirms universalism (if I read her right). The Bible speaks clearly and definitively to these issues. All of the Christian writers of the past whom she admires would have read the Bible in just the way I do. One may disagree with the Bible, of course: God permits us that freedom in this age. But that's not Ms. Robinson's M.O. She actually affirms "the authority" (her word) of the Bible explicitly in this book. I don't understand, and I wish to.
But Robinson's strengths are so strong that, even when I don't agree or am not sure I agree, I profit. Her prose style is clear but demanding—in a way that confers respect upon her readers. Ironically, it is this arch liberal, a friend of Barack Obama, who has done more to make me feel proud to be an American than anything I've read in forever. She makes me thankful for my cultural heritage, a culture whose egalitarianism made it possible for a little girl in Idaho to be given the kind of rigorous education that turns her into a Marilynne Robinson.
To fellow evangelical Christians I say: read Robinson for her critiques of scientism and Darwinism and materialism; read her for her rich understanding of your own tradition as found in Puritans both English and American. Read her for careful insights into Scripture, despite and because of their liberal source. Stick around for her critiques of capitalism and Republican ideology; we need to hear them. And then just enjoy the sheer pleasure of reading someone who is so smart.
(Listened through a second time in 2024. Will probably do it again.)
February 14, 2021
The introduction and the first few essays hit me hard. In particular there are some historically charged, mind-blowing thoughts about American assumptions about self-interest and competition that are absolutely worth dropping whatever you're doing and reading right now.
I found the theological pieces much harder to engage with because they seemed very nuanced in a genre I can't speak to, but I'm sure they were also very smart.
This collection overall left me feeling kind of bad? I'm sure that wasn't the intent at all, but by the end of this collection, I felt like the US was in the process of destroying everything good (universities, art, depth of life) in favor of rampant empty greed. Throughout the essays, there are harsh moments of insight about a public that stopped seeing itself as made up of citizens and instead as taxpayers. Reading this, I often thought of my relatives majored in business and still ended up working crap jobs. They intentionally avoided learning anything broadening, thoughtful, or creative and still came away with very little but bitterness and an eagerness to dismantle a system they hadn't bothered to experience.
Anyway, I've never read such adamant defenses of the Puritans. I feel foolish yet again for echoing the same bad general assumptions I learned in high school history class (obvs, we should all know better by now, but somehow the generalizations sunk in so deep that they can be hard to root out). I stand corrected and in need of better histories.
There's a call here to immerse ourselves in the specificity of history and experience. I found it totally compelling.
I found the theological pieces much harder to engage with because they seemed very nuanced in a genre I can't speak to, but I'm sure they were also very smart.
This collection overall left me feeling kind of bad? I'm sure that wasn't the intent at all, but by the end of this collection, I felt like the US was in the process of destroying everything good (universities, art, depth of life) in favor of rampant empty greed. Throughout the essays, there are harsh moments of insight about a public that stopped seeing itself as made up of citizens and instead as taxpayers. Reading this, I often thought of my relatives majored in business and still ended up working crap jobs. They intentionally avoided learning anything broadening, thoughtful, or creative and still came away with very little but bitterness and an eagerness to dismantle a system they hadn't bothered to experience.
Anyway, I've never read such adamant defenses of the Puritans. I feel foolish yet again for echoing the same bad general assumptions I learned in high school history class (obvs, we should all know better by now, but somehow the generalizations sunk in so deep that they can be hard to root out). I stand corrected and in need of better histories.
There's a call here to immerse ourselves in the specificity of history and experience. I found it totally compelling.
Read
March 7, 2018Is it common to repent while reading a book of essays? Blessedly, the scriptural tradition I hold sacred declares now to be the day of salvation, so I proceed. "Slander," the final essay in the volume, is of the most powerful and terrifying sermons I've ever encountered. You come too.
I think I will be assigning "Old Souls, New World" as a helpful context for students in thinking through early American literature. I found "Considering the Theological Virtues" helpful as well.
In some ways, if you've read Marilynne Robinson essays in any significant way before, you'll find here the familiar, and this volume represents more time to be in the presence of the Robinson that you know--but with some expansion of territory and a helpful thickening of source-reference-allusions (still no footnotes, I lament!) that comes with her expanding cultural authority. But now, having read everything except _Mother Country_ to which I will at least in part turn now, I feel much less repelled by her confidence, her tone, which has always made me feel, if I am honest, ashamed of myself and my own lack of confidence (tied, I suppose, to my own intellectual training and my own failures of courage or intellectual vigor). I suppose I have been worked on enough by the essays now, five books in, for them to persuade me of the value of much of what she values: human beings and souls as true mediators of the divine, beauty, publicly funded higher education--especially the humanities, the warps in intellectual fabric generated by failures of reading particular historical traditions (puritans, say, or Calvin, or Moses) in context, the inspirational and metaphorical power of recent advances in physics, scripture, utter generosity, truth, the honor due to every created human being.
I think I will be assigning "Old Souls, New World" as a helpful context for students in thinking through early American literature. I found "Considering the Theological Virtues" helpful as well.
In some ways, if you've read Marilynne Robinson essays in any significant way before, you'll find here the familiar, and this volume represents more time to be in the presence of the Robinson that you know--but with some expansion of territory and a helpful thickening of source-reference-allusions (still no footnotes, I lament!) that comes with her expanding cultural authority. But now, having read everything except _Mother Country_ to which I will at least in part turn now, I feel much less repelled by her confidence, her tone, which has always made me feel, if I am honest, ashamed of myself and my own lack of confidence (tied, I suppose, to my own intellectual training and my own failures of courage or intellectual vigor). I suppose I have been worked on enough by the essays now, five books in, for them to persuade me of the value of much of what she values: human beings and souls as true mediators of the divine, beauty, publicly funded higher education--especially the humanities, the warps in intellectual fabric generated by failures of reading particular historical traditions (puritans, say, or Calvin, or Moses) in context, the inspirational and metaphorical power of recent advances in physics, scripture, utter generosity, truth, the honor due to every created human being.
August 25, 2019
In my review of Robinson's previous book The Givenness of Things: Essays I already held an ode to her delightful non-conformism, deliberately opposing some of the sacred houses of our modernity (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) . I could repeat most of it here again, because Robinson recapitulates her favorite themes in this book. Again it is a collection of lectures, this time from the periode 2015-2017.
Robinson continues to conduct a fierce crusade against the reductionism and determinism of science. Not that she questions the validity of the scientific findings, but rather points to the limited domain about which science can say something meaningful, a domain that ignores a very broad field of human experience. Robinson is mainly talking about phenomena such as the self, the soul, the experience of wonder, beauty and grace, but also of conscience, sin and deficiency. In this book, modern anthropology in particular is her culprit “There is a huge elasticity in reality, or in other words, there are far too many layers and orders of complexity in all of Being to abide the simple accounts we try to make of things. This complexity is dynamic because every stratification of complexity from one moment to the next leads to countless other variables. (...) the tendency in the behavioural sciences in their description of the evolution of intelligence and language proficiency, and also their rigid models of human motivation are scanty in a way and to a degree that the experience cannot justify. "
Instead, Robinson argues once again for taking religious experience seriously, an experience that has collected and expressed relevant and still-refuted intuitions about (human) reality for thousands of years. Robinson focuses primarily on what she knows well: American Puritanism. Ardently she sketches how that puritanism in the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the most progressive trends in the social and political domain, and an expression of subtle views on essential human issues. She states this is a fact that is overlooked by almost all historians, philosophers and scientists. Maybe she exaggerates this, I can't judge that.
She also talks a lot about her other favourite themes, such as the suppression of humanism, and especially the "humanistic ideal" in education, which has to give way to purely utilitarian market approaches. And occasionally, she clearly plays out at Trump (but never mentions him by name) and everything he stands for.
If I am allowed some criticism: this book at times is so condensed that it is on the verge of readability, certainly in those passages that go deeper into Puritan theology. An also, because it involves different lectures she held over several years, there is also a good portion of repetition in this book. More fundamentally, I think that in her criticism of science, she may be exaggerating too much. I have just read some of Stephen Hawking's books and his scientific optimism of course is miles away from Robinson's anti-scientism, but top scientists like Hawking certainly seem to have been aware of the limitations of their approach. And especially within the social sciences there's s a growing tendency to try other approaches, in line with systems thinking or even holism.
Robinson certainly is right in her plea to take the metaphysical legacy, especially the religious one, seriously as an approach that also gives 'true' and 'reasonable' answers to what reality is, specifically the tremendous wonderful human reality. I don't think she is a religious fundamentalist at all, but perhaps she ignores too much the harm that has been done by religions in the past (and still is) to people, individually and collectively. It is her right to be one-sided, certainly in lectures where the rules of rhetoric are part of the game. I'm not blind for the dangers of this kind of exaggeration, but nevertheless, in my opinion the voice of Marilynne Robinson certainly has to be taken serious. (3.5 stars)
Robinson continues to conduct a fierce crusade against the reductionism and determinism of science. Not that she questions the validity of the scientific findings, but rather points to the limited domain about which science can say something meaningful, a domain that ignores a very broad field of human experience. Robinson is mainly talking about phenomena such as the self, the soul, the experience of wonder, beauty and grace, but also of conscience, sin and deficiency. In this book, modern anthropology in particular is her culprit “There is a huge elasticity in reality, or in other words, there are far too many layers and orders of complexity in all of Being to abide the simple accounts we try to make of things. This complexity is dynamic because every stratification of complexity from one moment to the next leads to countless other variables. (...) the tendency in the behavioural sciences in their description of the evolution of intelligence and language proficiency, and also their rigid models of human motivation are scanty in a way and to a degree that the experience cannot justify. "
Instead, Robinson argues once again for taking religious experience seriously, an experience that has collected and expressed relevant and still-refuted intuitions about (human) reality for thousands of years. Robinson focuses primarily on what she knows well: American Puritanism. Ardently she sketches how that puritanism in the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the most progressive trends in the social and political domain, and an expression of subtle views on essential human issues. She states this is a fact that is overlooked by almost all historians, philosophers and scientists. Maybe she exaggerates this, I can't judge that.
She also talks a lot about her other favourite themes, such as the suppression of humanism, and especially the "humanistic ideal" in education, which has to give way to purely utilitarian market approaches. And occasionally, she clearly plays out at Trump (but never mentions him by name) and everything he stands for.
If I am allowed some criticism: this book at times is so condensed that it is on the verge of readability, certainly in those passages that go deeper into Puritan theology. An also, because it involves different lectures she held over several years, there is also a good portion of repetition in this book. More fundamentally, I think that in her criticism of science, she may be exaggerating too much. I have just read some of Stephen Hawking's books and his scientific optimism of course is miles away from Robinson's anti-scientism, but top scientists like Hawking certainly seem to have been aware of the limitations of their approach. And especially within the social sciences there's s a growing tendency to try other approaches, in line with systems thinking or even holism.
Robinson certainly is right in her plea to take the metaphysical legacy, especially the religious one, seriously as an approach that also gives 'true' and 'reasonable' answers to what reality is, specifically the tremendous wonderful human reality. I don't think she is a religious fundamentalist at all, but perhaps she ignores too much the harm that has been done by religions in the past (and still is) to people, individually and collectively. It is her right to be one-sided, certainly in lectures where the rules of rhetoric are part of the game. I'm not blind for the dangers of this kind of exaggeration, but nevertheless, in my opinion the voice of Marilynne Robinson certainly has to be taken serious. (3.5 stars)
February 17, 2018
My review for the Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...
What does a set of theological essays — essays that aim plainly to consider the nature of God and religious belief in the context of both politics and individual consciousness — have to offer an increasingly secular country?
Marilynne Robinson intends to find out in her latest book, “What Are We Doing Here?,” an erudite, authoritative and demanding collection that probes questions of faith and doubt, history and ideology that both divide America and bring it together. As she says in her preface, “I know it is conventional to say that we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite — in essential ways we share false assumptions and false conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared.”
The ensuing 15 essays on such philosophical subjects as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” and “Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Love” prove unsparing in their examination of a dizzying assortment of assumptions about what “our core values” as a nation may or may not be, as well as what “we lose when we ignore early American history and, to the extent that when we notice it, mischaracterize it.”
The author of four acclaimed novels — including 1980’s “Housekeeping,” which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; 2004’s “Gilead,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; 2008’s “Home,” which won the Orange Prize; and 2014’s “Lila,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — Robinson is also an accomplished writer of nonfiction.
This, her sixth nonfiction book, continues in the voraciously intelligent and meditatively faithful vein of such previous essay collections as “The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought” and “The Givenness of Things.” Subjects that could be construed as a bit dry — science, public education, religion, consciousness — receive graceful treatment here.
In the title essay, she contemplates and defends the joys and uses of the humanities, citing examples from “Hamlet,” de Tocqueville, and Whitman to name a few. “If I seem to have conceded an important point in saying that the humanities do not prepare ideal helots, economically speaking,” she writes, “I do not at all mean to imply that they are less than ideal for preparing capable citizens, imaginative and innovative contributors to a full and generous, and largely unmonetizable national life.”
And in “Theology for This Moment” she observes: “No other species than ours could be called earnest.” Fittingly, this is an extremely earnest book, sincere and intense in its convictions.
The majority of the pieces were delivered as lectures at churches, seminaries and universities; thus, most have the distinctly instructive and at times admonitory tone of that kind of educational talk to an audience. When she warns against the tendency of both the right and the left to “flatten the historical landscape and to deal in moral equivalencies,” and laments that “we have surrendered thought to ideology,” one sometimes wonders if she is not, perhaps, engaging in some of the same flattening. Of whom exactly does this putative “we” consist?
This elegantly written book’s appeal to general readers who lack an intimate familiarity both with Christian scripture and Protestant history may frankly be somewhat limited. “In What Is Freedom of Conscience?”, for instance, she writes: “Conversely, it is somewhat unrespectable to have an interest in Cromwell, who is stigmatized in a way that makes him a sort of latter-day Albigensian, a religious fanatic hostile to all of life’s pleasures, and an autocrat besides.” But she follows this somewhat insiderish, divinity school observation with “Stigma is a vast oubliette. Amazing things are hidden in it” — statements pleasing for their metaphoric and metaphysical beauty and provocativeness.
Asserting that the language used by the left and the right to make declarations of value is often fraudulent and impoverished, and that “Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness,” doesn't quite qualify as bold, or particularly insightful. But if one needs to be reminded that the moral realm is complex, sophisticated and not always coincident with the realm of politics, then this book accomplishes that in refined prose, and from a Christian — particularly a Calvinist — perspective.
Robinson’s arguments that the state of discourse in contemporary America is frustrating, and that we could all stand to think for ourselves and be kinder, are familiar but evergreen. Heady and forceful, composed and serious, Robinson warns readers against despair and cynicism, encouraging us instead to embrace — ideally, in her opinion, through “Christian humanism” — “radical human equality and dignity.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...
What does a set of theological essays — essays that aim plainly to consider the nature of God and religious belief in the context of both politics and individual consciousness — have to offer an increasingly secular country?
Marilynne Robinson intends to find out in her latest book, “What Are We Doing Here?,” an erudite, authoritative and demanding collection that probes questions of faith and doubt, history and ideology that both divide America and bring it together. As she says in her preface, “I know it is conventional to say that we Americans are radically divided, polarized. But this is not more true than its opposite — in essential ways we share false assumptions and false conclusions that are never effectively examined because they are indeed shared.”
The ensuing 15 essays on such philosophical subjects as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” and “Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Love” prove unsparing in their examination of a dizzying assortment of assumptions about what “our core values” as a nation may or may not be, as well as what “we lose when we ignore early American history and, to the extent that when we notice it, mischaracterize it.”
The author of four acclaimed novels — including 1980’s “Housekeeping,” which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; 2004’s “Gilead,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; 2008’s “Home,” which won the Orange Prize; and 2014’s “Lila,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award — Robinson is also an accomplished writer of nonfiction.
This, her sixth nonfiction book, continues in the voraciously intelligent and meditatively faithful vein of such previous essay collections as “The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought” and “The Givenness of Things.” Subjects that could be construed as a bit dry — science, public education, religion, consciousness — receive graceful treatment here.
In the title essay, she contemplates and defends the joys and uses of the humanities, citing examples from “Hamlet,” de Tocqueville, and Whitman to name a few. “If I seem to have conceded an important point in saying that the humanities do not prepare ideal helots, economically speaking,” she writes, “I do not at all mean to imply that they are less than ideal for preparing capable citizens, imaginative and innovative contributors to a full and generous, and largely unmonetizable national life.”
And in “Theology for This Moment” she observes: “No other species than ours could be called earnest.” Fittingly, this is an extremely earnest book, sincere and intense in its convictions.
The majority of the pieces were delivered as lectures at churches, seminaries and universities; thus, most have the distinctly instructive and at times admonitory tone of that kind of educational talk to an audience. When she warns against the tendency of both the right and the left to “flatten the historical landscape and to deal in moral equivalencies,” and laments that “we have surrendered thought to ideology,” one sometimes wonders if she is not, perhaps, engaging in some of the same flattening. Of whom exactly does this putative “we” consist?
This elegantly written book’s appeal to general readers who lack an intimate familiarity both with Christian scripture and Protestant history may frankly be somewhat limited. “In What Is Freedom of Conscience?”, for instance, she writes: “Conversely, it is somewhat unrespectable to have an interest in Cromwell, who is stigmatized in a way that makes him a sort of latter-day Albigensian, a religious fanatic hostile to all of life’s pleasures, and an autocrat besides.” But she follows this somewhat insiderish, divinity school observation with “Stigma is a vast oubliette. Amazing things are hidden in it” — statements pleasing for their metaphoric and metaphysical beauty and provocativeness.
Asserting that the language used by the left and the right to make declarations of value is often fraudulent and impoverished, and that “Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness,” doesn't quite qualify as bold, or particularly insightful. But if one needs to be reminded that the moral realm is complex, sophisticated and not always coincident with the realm of politics, then this book accomplishes that in refined prose, and from a Christian — particularly a Calvinist — perspective.
Robinson’s arguments that the state of discourse in contemporary America is frustrating, and that we could all stand to think for ourselves and be kinder, are familiar but evergreen. Heady and forceful, composed and serious, Robinson warns readers against despair and cynicism, encouraging us instead to embrace — ideally, in her opinion, through “Christian humanism” — “radical human equality and dignity.”
May 13, 2018
These essays, as academic rather than literary artifacts, are so much stronger than the pseudo-philosophy that so many writers attempt. In many of these essays, Robinson engages seriously with the debate between science and religion, and has much to offer on the nature of human consciousness and the role of beauty ("We have in ourselves grounds for supposing that Being is vaster, more luminous, more consequential than we have allowed ourselves to imagine for many generations"). She also makes a strong case for the ongoing need for the humanities, a persistent defense of Puritanism (and Cromwell, interestingly), and overall recounts interesting facets of early American history. If you are interested in a philosophy of religion, John Edwards, or early American history this collection would absolutely be up your alley. I also think it is useful in providing context for Robinson's (pulitzer-prize winning) fiction.
April 22, 2018
For some reason, I don't quite grasp her essays but I love their depth. Ms. Robinson is a subtle writer who suggests more than states (I think) and is remarkable as a highly theologically literate thinker and author. I keep going back to her works for refreshment.
December 30, 2018
This was very hard to read. The vocabulary was above me. The prose was complicated and nuanced. The subject matter was very deep from Christianity to the malignancy of our current affairs. She deals with science, Puritans, old English history, conscience, philosophy of "being" and the interplay of these issues and others. I spent the entire book nodding in assent even when I had to re-read some sentences (indeed some multiple pages) over and over. I learned many tidbits from this book and feel like I should get a couple of college credits for it. It is clearly worth the five stars!
March 24, 2018
It is no accident that Marxism and social Darwinism arose together, two tellers of one tale. It is not surprising that they have disgraced themselves in similar ways. Their survival more than one hundred and fifty years on is probably owed to the symmetry of their supposed opposition. Based on a single paradigm, they reinforce each other as legitimate modes of thought. So it is with our contemporary Left and Right. Between them we circle in a maelstrom of utter fatuousness.
What Are We Doing Here? is a collection of “mostly lectures...given in churches, seminaries, and universities over the past few years”; reflecting not only Marilynne Robinson's usual preoccupation with Calvinist thought, but extending her ideas to the current American political climate. Because these lectures were given so close together, but at different venues, they often circle and repeat the exact same points over and over again; making this, as a reading experience, slightly more tedious than necessary. These essays are challenging (I can't imagine sitting in an auditorium and listening to Robinson speak without the benefit of going back and rereading the passages I didn't understand the first time through), and they're sometimes dry, but I never found them boring; there's definitely value in collecting the current preoccupations of such a deep thinker in one place like this.
When Stephen Hawking died recently, the social media that I follow included posts by religious folk who said such things as, “I am deeply saddened that he died not knowing God the Creator of all things”, and responses from those “rational thinkers” who then replied with, “You can believe in an invisible sky fairy all you like but, if he does exist, screw him for inventing ALS.” (I would like to note, with utter neutrality, that in A Brief History of Time, back in the 1980s, Dr. Hawking stated his goal to describe the universe in such a way that no creator God was necessary; I don't believe he accomplished this, but either way, he's either currently in possession of the ultimate truths or simply extinguished – what we believe about it is no longer relevant.) It's where Robinson responds to this particular public discourse – wherein religious belief is seen as primitive and unintelligent and scientism is seen as definitive and rational – that I was most interested.
Our ways of understanding the world now, our systems and ideologies, have an authority for us that leads us to think of them as exhaustive accounts of reality rather than, at best, as instruments of understanding suited to particular uses.
As a professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Robinson has watched as the humanities have lost their presumed validity as an area of study. Centuries of rising humanism has pushed our gods to the edge of relevance, but we now find ourselves in a post-humanist world – where it is fashionable to call humans the least of Earth's animals and regret our effects, and even our presence, on the planet (beliefs that I see on my own social media every day) – and if we no longer see value in humans, we certainly don't see value in studying the humanities at a post-secondary level. Our meanness of spirit (the transformation from “Citizens” to merely “Taxpayers”) resents funding public institutions of higher learning, insisting if we do that the young should only be studying “trades”; not recognising that it is through the humanities – art, music, literature – that humans have been expressing what is divine in themselves all along. Over several of these lectures, and especially with regards to the discovery of dark matter, Robinson makes the point that science is continually making observations that contradict what we previously thought was “settled truth”; why do we believe that science is truth in itself instead of simply one method for observing the world? Science dismisses the felt experience – mind and conscience – as mere side effects of evolution, and in several places, Robinson wonders why we don't challenge the “cynicism as ultimate truth” of Richard Dawkins, et al:
Who can show me a shred of empirical evidence for the existence of anything resembling a selfish gene? The prejudice that allows these theories to claim the authority of reason and science is, among many other things, a slander on reason and science.
And in a later lecture she ties it all up thusly:
Science before the twentieth century supported the assumption that reason was, as the physicists say, flat, that like the laws of nature its rules were the same everywhere and in all circumstances, and that whatever they could not countenance was an error, a primitive survival, a mystification. Then along came quantum physics, relativity, a theory of cosmic origins, and science ever since has been constantly at work at a new poetry, trying to capture something of the startling elegance, novel to our eyes, that eventuates everything that is. Crucially assisted by dark matter, of course, which seems to hold the heavens together and about which little else can at present be said. Only grant that a great, creating holiness is at the center of it all, and one must arrive at something like the extraordinary language in which the ancients invested their perceptions. For the ancients, the great, creative holiness was the intuition, the conception, that forced their language so far beyond the limits of the commonplace. Science departed from its origins in religion not so very long ago. If these two great thought systems are not now once again reaching a place of convergence, the fault lies with religion, which, in a fit of defensive panic, has abandoned its profoundest insights and has never reclaimed them.
Surely, where science and religion converge must be a lovely and satisfying place to live. And while this was the most interesting thread for me personally, it wasn't the only one in this collection. Robinson makes much of Americans' lack of knowledge of their own history and origins – and especially with respect to the (apparently unfairly maligned) Puritans; the freedom-fighting abolitionist knowledge-seekers who founded both Harvard and Yale deserve to be remembered for more than the pejorative “Puritanical” (more than once Robinson asks, non-rhetorically, if there weren't witch trials in the South at the same time). Robinson traces and retraces the religious writings of Jonathan Edwards and quotes from The Actes and Monuments of the Martyrs by John Foxe; with several references to the Golden Rule, Robinson seems to be making the point that if we were to recognise the divine in both ourselves and in our neighbours, there would be no poverty or income disparity – the death of God was the death of faith, hope, and charity, which led us directly to where we find ourselves today, yelling at each other over the internet.
There are two personal pieces in this collection that don't seem to fit with the scholarly tone of the others, but they are both fascinating reads. A Proof, a Test, an Instruction is on the personal relationship that Robinson developed with President Obama:
Having spoken with the president, having had some direct experience of his humor, his intelligence and courtesy, and his goodness, I consider it probable that those who have opposed him so intractably did so because they knew how remarkable a leader he could be. They were threatened by the possibility of a great president, one who could lead the country in a direction they did not favor and give prestige to a vision they did not share.
And the final essay, Slander, was on Robinson's aging mother and how watching Fox News made her fearful; tormented by anxieties and regrets:
I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America. I would go to hell for it, too, a fact she considered both regrettable and just.
Where this kind of Left-Right chasm can open within a family, it seems obvious that there is something wrong with public discourse today. Robinson's writings have given me much to think about in this regard.
March 14, 2018
Marilynne Robinson is one of the most thoughtful writers of our time, capable of finding and savoring beauty in humanity, despite the millions of ways we pile insult and injury upon each other. In this newest collection of essays, talks, and addresses, she engages questions and concerns at the forefront of the American consciousness: What is the role of education, and to what extent are our current educational systems serving the populace as they ought? What can be done about the frightening acceleration of polarization within the country, and how can we have any meaningful conversations nowadays? Are there bounds to the domain of scientific inquiry, and to what extent does religion have a role in the modern world? And ultimately and incorporated into almost every piece: Is there a self beyond the biological machinery of the human body, or in other words, is there a soul?
To say these are hard questions with which to wrestle is an understatement. To say that she succeeds in effectively engaging with them is not hyperbole. This is easily the most challenging but also most valuable book I have read this year.
In several essays, most notably "The American Scholar Now," she captures the value of a broad, humanities-oriented, liberal education by tracing the origins of higher education in America as an attempt to provide broad access to a classical base of education which was previously a privilege of the elites. This was at the core of how to have a populace that would be informed and able to govern itself democratically. She also questions the motives of those who would sneer at the utility of such an education, and warns us against turning our bastions of learning into factories for the production of effective workers.
In many essays, she turns to her favored subject, the Puritans. She argues that the Puritans of New England were hardly the stoic, intolerant, and exotic folk of Miller's Crucible and the general public consciousness, but rather an extremely (for the time) tolerant bunch, whose laws directly prefigure the Bill of Rights and who were not isolated but living in a historical stream that connected them to England's Lollards and the Commonwealth under Cromwell, Geneva's Calvinists, and various other groups across Europe. In doing so, she exposes the systemic biases we bring to history, and how those can blind us to useful and fascinating discoveries.
She spends several essays discussing the role of theology in understanding the human condition. She argues, in "Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition," "The Divine," and "Grace and Beauty," among others, that the progression of scientism and modernity, which has effectively tried to dismiss the soul, the supernatural, and the substance of faith in favor of a worldview purely explicable by observed experience, has jettisoned not only God, but all the attributes we used to refer to as "godly" within humanity, and unnecessarily. She argues, and I am compelled to believe her, that we can with full intellectual integrity wonder at the amazing discoveries of science and dream about the unknown extents into which science will shed light in the year to come, while still wholeheartedly believing in the presence of a Divine Being who intentionally spoke the World into creation. By removing God completely from the equation of what it means to be human, we are left with a relatively flimsy explanation that all is for the sake of self-preservation, and yet that there is no true self beyond one's genes, physical brain, and the material stuff of the human body.
These essays/talks were penned between 2016 and 2018, indisputably a time of great change in the character and direction of America. Politics and current events undoubtedly affected her thoughts and her writing, and grow more apparent moving forward in time, but she treats them and everyone with a certain grace which is rare today. Perhaps most powerfully, in her final essay "Slander", she tackles the elephant in the room, the polarization of America and the culture of tribalism and condescension (from all sides) towards the other, which seems to accompany virtually all public conversation today. The story becomes personal as she relates how her mother, in her final years, became increasingly enamored of Fox News, and how the corresponding changes in her ideology led to an irreparable breach between them. She then turns to James 3:5-10, a passage on the power of the tongue to create blessing and perform great ill towards others. She bluntly addresses Christians, of all political leanings and persuasions, of all denominations and groups. 'In light of this passage, and many others,' she seems to say, 'how can you defend yourself?' I was convicted of my own complicit role in slander and bitter comments towards others, and thus this same tribalism and polarization. She argues that at the very least, we are called to be civil towards each other, and in reality, we are called to love one another, full stop.
You see, Robinson is not merely a philosopher or commentator on current events. She is a committed Christ-follower, who is pained by the culture that she sees today. She is pained that so many would so quickly dismiss the existence of God and insist any theologic philosophy is deficient or primitive. And she is equally pained that so many who claim to follow Christ would defend their own "inalienable" rights to the exclusion of the rights of the poor, the orphan, the sojourner, the minorities...and in doing so defy Christ's call to show grace and love to "the least of these" and to love the neighbor as one's self.
You've got to read this.
To say these are hard questions with which to wrestle is an understatement. To say that she succeeds in effectively engaging with them is not hyperbole. This is easily the most challenging but also most valuable book I have read this year.
In several essays, most notably "The American Scholar Now," she captures the value of a broad, humanities-oriented, liberal education by tracing the origins of higher education in America as an attempt to provide broad access to a classical base of education which was previously a privilege of the elites. This was at the core of how to have a populace that would be informed and able to govern itself democratically. She also questions the motives of those who would sneer at the utility of such an education, and warns us against turning our bastions of learning into factories for the production of effective workers.
In many essays, she turns to her favored subject, the Puritans. She argues that the Puritans of New England were hardly the stoic, intolerant, and exotic folk of Miller's Crucible and the general public consciousness, but rather an extremely (for the time) tolerant bunch, whose laws directly prefigure the Bill of Rights and who were not isolated but living in a historical stream that connected them to England's Lollards and the Commonwealth under Cromwell, Geneva's Calvinists, and various other groups across Europe. In doing so, she exposes the systemic biases we bring to history, and how those can blind us to useful and fascinating discoveries.
She spends several essays discussing the role of theology in understanding the human condition. She argues, in "Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition," "The Divine," and "Grace and Beauty," among others, that the progression of scientism and modernity, which has effectively tried to dismiss the soul, the supernatural, and the substance of faith in favor of a worldview purely explicable by observed experience, has jettisoned not only God, but all the attributes we used to refer to as "godly" within humanity, and unnecessarily. She argues, and I am compelled to believe her, that we can with full intellectual integrity wonder at the amazing discoveries of science and dream about the unknown extents into which science will shed light in the year to come, while still wholeheartedly believing in the presence of a Divine Being who intentionally spoke the World into creation. By removing God completely from the equation of what it means to be human, we are left with a relatively flimsy explanation that all is for the sake of self-preservation, and yet that there is no true self beyond one's genes, physical brain, and the material stuff of the human body.
These essays/talks were penned between 2016 and 2018, indisputably a time of great change in the character and direction of America. Politics and current events undoubtedly affected her thoughts and her writing, and grow more apparent moving forward in time, but she treats them and everyone with a certain grace which is rare today. Perhaps most powerfully, in her final essay "Slander", she tackles the elephant in the room, the polarization of America and the culture of tribalism and condescension (from all sides) towards the other, which seems to accompany virtually all public conversation today. The story becomes personal as she relates how her mother, in her final years, became increasingly enamored of Fox News, and how the corresponding changes in her ideology led to an irreparable breach between them. She then turns to James 3:5-10, a passage on the power of the tongue to create blessing and perform great ill towards others. She bluntly addresses Christians, of all political leanings and persuasions, of all denominations and groups. 'In light of this passage, and many others,' she seems to say, 'how can you defend yourself?' I was convicted of my own complicit role in slander and bitter comments towards others, and thus this same tribalism and polarization. She argues that at the very least, we are called to be civil towards each other, and in reality, we are called to love one another, full stop.
You see, Robinson is not merely a philosopher or commentator on current events. She is a committed Christ-follower, who is pained by the culture that she sees today. She is pained that so many would so quickly dismiss the existence of God and insist any theologic philosophy is deficient or primitive. And she is equally pained that so many who claim to follow Christ would defend their own "inalienable" rights to the exclusion of the rights of the poor, the orphan, the sojourner, the minorities...and in doing so defy Christ's call to show grace and love to "the least of these" and to love the neighbor as one's self.
You've got to read this.
April 20, 2018
We have invented common ground so that we can fight on it. This ground is a place that is safe from conceptions of mind and spirit and a significant amount of nuance in our history. It has been hammered flat. But our terms come at the immeasurable cost of all that is immeasurable.
In this dry and diminished conversation, Marilynne Robinson answers a deep-seated thirst for wonder.
Her approach is to take exception to our culture's basic assumptions about who we are and explore them in the light of her primary interests- Jesus, Moses, the enlightenment, Shakespeare, John Calvin, Puritans, New England, and current theories about matter, the universe, and our origins. These exceptions form lectures and articles that she writes on occasion, and when she has enough of them, she compiles a new book.
The approach bears good fruit as it circles around her central concerns, yielding new phrases, insights, and lights by which to see. Sometimes, because they are designed as independent essays, they retread the same territory in the same way throughout the collection. These redundant moments diminished some of the thrill of revelation I felt while reading ("Oh, I guess we're going to be talking for a while about how misunderstood the Puritans are again"), but the overall impact of the collection was profound for me.
Those who find her essays scattered are probably not aware of how deeply focused they are on recognizing the complex, irreducible glory of humanity. She sees in us the image of an immeasurable god and enormous potential for perception and beauty. She urges us to see it in ourselves and our neighbors as well.
The breathtaking workings of her mind on our basic nature and purpose have helped to redefine my thinking in important ways. While reading this book, I gained deeper and more resonant definitions of ideas central to my life- faith, hope, love, and beauty. I also gained a restored sense of wonder at people- who we are, our stories, and the unpredictable ways we shape and are shaped by our world.
In this dry and diminished conversation, Marilynne Robinson answers a deep-seated thirst for wonder.
Her approach is to take exception to our culture's basic assumptions about who we are and explore them in the light of her primary interests- Jesus, Moses, the enlightenment, Shakespeare, John Calvin, Puritans, New England, and current theories about matter, the universe, and our origins. These exceptions form lectures and articles that she writes on occasion, and when she has enough of them, she compiles a new book.
The approach bears good fruit as it circles around her central concerns, yielding new phrases, insights, and lights by which to see. Sometimes, because they are designed as independent essays, they retread the same territory in the same way throughout the collection. These redundant moments diminished some of the thrill of revelation I felt while reading ("Oh, I guess we're going to be talking for a while about how misunderstood the Puritans are again"), but the overall impact of the collection was profound for me.
Those who find her essays scattered are probably not aware of how deeply focused they are on recognizing the complex, irreducible glory of humanity. She sees in us the image of an immeasurable god and enormous potential for perception and beauty. She urges us to see it in ourselves and our neighbors as well.
The breathtaking workings of her mind on our basic nature and purpose have helped to redefine my thinking in important ways. While reading this book, I gained deeper and more resonant definitions of ideas central to my life- faith, hope, love, and beauty. I also gained a restored sense of wonder at people- who we are, our stories, and the unpredictable ways we shape and are shaped by our world.
June 6, 2019
I can’t tell whether I liked this book. Robinson is a fascinating writer with opinions and thought-paths that are often unexpected. I thought I understood her from reading Gilead (a superb, unique, touching read), but her Christian apologist essays here surprised me. I don't hate them, generally speaking, but I didn't feel warmed and excited by the thoughts presented in them, the way I did about the philosophy of her fiction.
June 8, 2020
Marilynne Robinson is an immensely intelligent person. Not in her fiction and non-fiction essays such as this book, she delves into early colonial history, modern day racial issues, American society, religion and theology. While I have no doubt she is brilliant, it is on these latter two topics that I must profess I struggled to keep up with both her vocabulary and her ideas (perhaps my not understanding her is the true sign of her intelligence).
Where she, and this book, truly excel however is in her essays on who we are as a culture and how we got here. Namely, God and the Puritans.
Now, I’m not a very religious person and like most people, the word Puritan for me conjures up images of burning witches and emotionally and sexually repressed colonists hunkering down in New England. Robinson however tells us that this is as far from the truth. Her research shows the Puritans to in fact be a remarkably tolerant people who valued education, respect for others, and kindness for those less fortunate than them. Anne Hutchison, may have disagreed with Robinson’s assessment that the Puritans showed her great tolerance after being banned from the colony (for mostly being a woman but also being a woman who was leading biblical study sessions from her home) but postponing it until the brutal New England winter had passed so she didn’t freeze to death. This is indeed a form of kindness I suppose. Of course, she most likely would just as rather not been banished at all for leading people in prayer.
While Robinson acknowledges her unusual fascination with redeeming Puritan culture, she does so from a place of heeding us all to not let history die or be distorted. this is a think a laudable and important portion to be speaking from.
For what happens in history continues to reverberate. To simply demonize someone like the Puritans as religious fanatics is not only untrue, it poses a danger of allowing us to play fast and loose with other historical people and periods we may not be in total agreement with. Truth loses out, and by extension when we obscure or falsify what brought us to this moment of history, we lose as well.
Robinson’s writing shines particularly in her essay on humanism and the importance of higher education.
As she points out, there is a long and deep rooted pride in America’s ability to provide its citizens with a well rounded education. Robinson laments, as do I, the recent trend to reverse the original intent of American universities (there go those Puritan again!) in favor of a more utilitarian approach where an education’s purpose is to prepare workers for the workforce rather than life, art, and beauty. This approach views the study of literature, art, music, everything that makes life worth living as somehow a frivolous luxury a strong economy can’t afford. Yes we all have to work, but what a dreary and joyless thought it is that in the name of staying “competitive” in the global economy we must ruthlessly excise anything that doesn’t contribute to that purpose. Would it in fact be so bad not to be the strongest country in the world if we all were able to work fewer hours at a standard of living reflecting human dignity while spending more time with out loved ones?
Would Americans even notice anything different if we weren’t the world’s largest economy but rather its 3rd? or even 5th?
As Robinson writes, the decline of humanism has led to a society where while we were once a nation of citizens that depended on each other and appreciated and created art for its own sake, we are now simply “taxpayers” whose sole goal is lower taxes.
We were, and for the most part still are, a nation that reflects the selflessness and love for those less fortunate than ourselves. A country that embraced immigration (what are the Puritans after all but immigrants) and recognized the vast benefits it has provided. As Robinson writes:
“Those who speak of the United States as great, formerly if not at present, must acknowledge that immigration has been concomitant with our greatest moments, wherever they wish to locate them. It is perverse, though clearly effective, to treat deep experience of other cultures as compromising. The candidate John Kerry spoke French, so much for him. So did Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, and they read it, too, as educated Americans did during that seminal period, to our benefit, no doubt.”
Robinson however remains hopeful that these negative trends in society can be reversed and that somehow we can begin once again to find deeper meaning in our lives. Something that is spiritual, life affirming, and a path toward truly making America great again.
April 7, 2018
What Are We Doing Here? has been my first foray into Marilynne Robinson's non-fiction essays, and it was like drinking from a fire hose! There is so much density of thought, so much artistry of language, that I am certain I could read it a number of times and still see different and compelling ideas come to the fore in new ways.
Compiled from a number of her lectures from the past few years, this recently-released collection is timely, and Robinson seems to have her finger on the religious, cultural, media, and academic pulses of our day as she presents a nuanced alternative to outrage. But she's old enough to have been around the block a few times and doesn't hold back, either. "We have surrendered thought to ideology," she says in the first essay. "Every question is for all purposes the same question, every answer the same answer." Indeed. This collection proposes some different questions, different answers.
Because these essays were originally lectures, there are many similar themes that emerge through the book. Even for an academic, writer, and speaker as compelling as Robinson, I suppose one cannot reinvent the wheel every time one is asked to speak. Thus, a number of themes surface over and over: her deep respect for the individual human as created in the divine image (and her related interest in the value of the humanities as a pursuit); her interest in "redeeming" bad or misunderstood history (the Puritans, and how they weren't puritanical in the sense we imagine the word, feature prominently in a number of essays); and the uncomfortable tensions between science and religion (which she doesn't seem to buy either being mutually-exclusive); among others.
Though well-respected by individuals of diverse faiths (or none), Robinson's Christianity shows in this collection, and she is not apologetic of it. Nor should she be. She says, "I write books that are straightforwardly Christian, and I write religious and theological essays. A question I am asked, almost always by Christians, is: Weren't you afraid? This question truly, deeply gives me the creeps. I have been confirmed again and again in the belief that I live in a free country. I write about what is on my mind." One of her most pointed and powerful Christian in my estimation was the final one (or maybe that's because it is fresh in my mind, having been the most recently read). The essay, "Slander," is critical of the political Christian right (a concern which I, though likely more conservative than she, share) and holds all Christians to account for the power of their words.
This book won't be everyone's cup of tea. But that's okay. That won't bother Robinson at all. "There are a great many fine books in the world... so if some readers are turned away from mine by my choice of subject, they are at no risk of deprivation."
If you do, however, decide to read this book, make sure to take a deep breath first. Also, make sure you have a dictionary on hand. You're going to need it!
Compiled from a number of her lectures from the past few years, this recently-released collection is timely, and Robinson seems to have her finger on the religious, cultural, media, and academic pulses of our day as she presents a nuanced alternative to outrage. But she's old enough to have been around the block a few times and doesn't hold back, either. "We have surrendered thought to ideology," she says in the first essay. "Every question is for all purposes the same question, every answer the same answer." Indeed. This collection proposes some different questions, different answers.
Because these essays were originally lectures, there are many similar themes that emerge through the book. Even for an academic, writer, and speaker as compelling as Robinson, I suppose one cannot reinvent the wheel every time one is asked to speak. Thus, a number of themes surface over and over: her deep respect for the individual human as created in the divine image (and her related interest in the value of the humanities as a pursuit); her interest in "redeeming" bad or misunderstood history (the Puritans, and how they weren't puritanical in the sense we imagine the word, feature prominently in a number of essays); and the uncomfortable tensions between science and religion (which she doesn't seem to buy either being mutually-exclusive); among others.
Though well-respected by individuals of diverse faiths (or none), Robinson's Christianity shows in this collection, and she is not apologetic of it. Nor should she be. She says, "I write books that are straightforwardly Christian, and I write religious and theological essays. A question I am asked, almost always by Christians, is: Weren't you afraid? This question truly, deeply gives me the creeps. I have been confirmed again and again in the belief that I live in a free country. I write about what is on my mind." One of her most pointed and powerful Christian in my estimation was the final one (or maybe that's because it is fresh in my mind, having been the most recently read). The essay, "Slander," is critical of the political Christian right (a concern which I, though likely more conservative than she, share) and holds all Christians to account for the power of their words.
This book won't be everyone's cup of tea. But that's okay. That won't bother Robinson at all. "There are a great many fine books in the world... so if some readers are turned away from mine by my choice of subject, they are at no risk of deprivation."
If you do, however, decide to read this book, make sure to take a deep breath first. Also, make sure you have a dictionary on hand. You're going to need it!
December 23, 2017
I received this book for free through Goodreads Giveaways and have chosen to give my honest opinion about it.
This book was actually such an interesting read! It's always refreshing to see such an inquisitive angle to things we often take for granted, and to challenge our perceptions of the factors in our lives which we consider above us. While some of the ideas here relied a bit too much on biblical literature for my taste, it was overall an intellectually stimulating read that I would definitely recommend flipping through at least, if not fully diving in.
This book was actually such an interesting read! It's always refreshing to see such an inquisitive angle to things we often take for granted, and to challenge our perceptions of the factors in our lives which we consider above us. While some of the ideas here relied a bit too much on biblical literature for my taste, it was overall an intellectually stimulating read that I would definitely recommend flipping through at least, if not fully diving in.
January 21, 2018
What are we doing here? Wasting my time. This book is so dry and annoying, it's somehow both religious and anti religious at the same time, and I can pretty much sum the whole book up with don't be a dick. It seems like she's trying to fix the world, specifically the US, and if everyone lived by the slogan don't be a dick, we'd be pretty ok. The one redeeming essay was A Proof, a Test, an Instruction, which was primarily about Obama, and it was interesting, but at 11 pages it's a small gold nugget in a pile of dirt.
I won this in a goodreads giveaway
I won this in a goodreads giveaway
July 13, 2020
In this collection of speeches and essays, Robinson--ever the contrarian--makes room for a non-materialist, theological understanding of the world; rehabilitates the Puritans and important aspects of their worldview; and challenges some of our most cherished modern understandings of our country and our politics. It was a challenging read because in many ways, I belong to a different "tribe" than Robinson, but in other ways, I don't. She is my favorite liberal Protestant precisely because we agree on so many things but disagree on so many others, and therefore, she exposes blind spots in my thinking but also helps me reason through why I believe certain things and why I may disagree with her.
One of the reasons why I love Robinson's fiction is that she imbues the ordinary moments of life with extraordinary meaning--for example, the musings of small-town preacher John Ames on growing old, family, and friendships or the lasting effects of trauma on his wife Lila Ames. Robinson's nonfiction functions similarly. I love one of her eccentric and repeated phrases: "the givenness of things" because it speaks to the grace that we can experience each and every day of our lives if we give time to step back and ponder our existence. Our lives are not something that we take hold of and control on our own merit but rather, it is given to us by some imponderable act of charity. It is, for me, a particularly useful reorientation during this atypical quarantine era where I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into self-concern.
I've also loved this collection of essays because Robinson loves to harp on how modern America has distorted the vision and lives of the Puritans. Many of the essays include long discussions of their lives, their thinking, their theology, and their influence. I, too, love the Puritans, though I tend to emphasize different aspects of their theology than Robinson does. But Robinson opened my eyes to some of these overlooked aspects of their thinking and things that are just as valuable that I tended to overlook given my own biases, assumptions, and worldview.
One of Robinson's Puritan anecdote that has stuck with me is one that Robinson repeats multiple times in different essays. She often quotes John Flavel, a seventeenth century English Puritan who asks whether we might all be judged twice, once when we die and once again when the full consequences of our lives have played themselves out. According to Robinson, Flavel says that this second judgment will not occur until no living mind remembers any slander, any injurious word, any misconduct that we have spoken or acted upon. This is chastening because it reminds me that I am all too often prone to speak a harsh word quickly without thinking about its long-term effects, eager to make a "joke" at someone else's expense, liable to slander the "other" out of fear or misunderstanding. I can look down on another person made in the image of God because I think myself better, and while that thought may recede from my own memory, others can carry that burden forward without my knowing. It's sobering and a call to discipline our lives and our thinking and to recognize that all of us share a common humanity in light of the grace shown to us, "the givenness of things."
One of the reasons why I love Robinson's fiction is that she imbues the ordinary moments of life with extraordinary meaning--for example, the musings of small-town preacher John Ames on growing old, family, and friendships or the lasting effects of trauma on his wife Lila Ames. Robinson's nonfiction functions similarly. I love one of her eccentric and repeated phrases: "the givenness of things" because it speaks to the grace that we can experience each and every day of our lives if we give time to step back and ponder our existence. Our lives are not something that we take hold of and control on our own merit but rather, it is given to us by some imponderable act of charity. It is, for me, a particularly useful reorientation during this atypical quarantine era where I find myself sinking deeper and deeper into self-concern.
I've also loved this collection of essays because Robinson loves to harp on how modern America has distorted the vision and lives of the Puritans. Many of the essays include long discussions of their lives, their thinking, their theology, and their influence. I, too, love the Puritans, though I tend to emphasize different aspects of their theology than Robinson does. But Robinson opened my eyes to some of these overlooked aspects of their thinking and things that are just as valuable that I tended to overlook given my own biases, assumptions, and worldview.
One of Robinson's Puritan anecdote that has stuck with me is one that Robinson repeats multiple times in different essays. She often quotes John Flavel, a seventeenth century English Puritan who asks whether we might all be judged twice, once when we die and once again when the full consequences of our lives have played themselves out. According to Robinson, Flavel says that this second judgment will not occur until no living mind remembers any slander, any injurious word, any misconduct that we have spoken or acted upon. This is chastening because it reminds me that I am all too often prone to speak a harsh word quickly without thinking about its long-term effects, eager to make a "joke" at someone else's expense, liable to slander the "other" out of fear or misunderstanding. I can look down on another person made in the image of God because I think myself better, and while that thought may recede from my own memory, others can carry that burden forward without my knowing. It's sobering and a call to discipline our lives and our thinking and to recognize that all of us share a common humanity in light of the grace shown to us, "the givenness of things."
April 4, 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?"
"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?"
March 2, 2019
I did not realize until recently that Robinson, received a 2012 National Humanities Medal, from President Barack Obama, for "her grace and intelligence in writing." Amen! One of my favorite fiction writers, I was unaware of her career at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Now that her academic writing has been revealed to me, i will be busy, dictionary and reference works at the ready, to digest her amazing talent demonstrated in other nonfiction books.
This is an incisive, challenging collection of essays, many of them speeches from high level symposia. These essays of "contemporary themes" follow favorite subject areas for Robinson such as the midwest, Puritanism, the intersection of science and religion, Darwin and Calvinism. The essay on John Edwards has caused me to consider reading Tocqueville because i have so little understanding of these historic, demanding writers.
As Ranganathan states, "Every book her reader," I believe this book reached me in the exact moment I was ready to read it.
This is an incisive, challenging collection of essays, many of them speeches from high level symposia. These essays of "contemporary themes" follow favorite subject areas for Robinson such as the midwest, Puritanism, the intersection of science and religion, Darwin and Calvinism. The essay on John Edwards has caused me to consider reading Tocqueville because i have so little understanding of these historic, demanding writers.
As Ranganathan states, "Every book her reader," I believe this book reached me in the exact moment I was ready to read it.
Read
October 13, 2022i would never be so bold as to give THE marilynne robinson something so inane as a rating. i will say however that her brain is so much bigger and more beautiful than mine
August 3, 2018
Some really great essays (including the last one, which rightly calls to account what passes for Christianity in the USA these days), but also a bit of a mixed bag. Perhaps what hurts it most is how much overlap there is between the parts. It's clear these are mostly talks delivered over the course of a couple years, and thus almost read as remixes of the same basic materials at times. And we've all heard enough remixes to know that some are great and some... not as much.
Her attempted rehabilitation of the Puritans and their legacy is refreshing, especially when she can resist the urge of patting herself on the back for it. One of her signature moves in the collection is to insist that we must understand movements and thinkers (Flavell, Jonathan Edwards, Calvin) in their context and against the background of their times. Fine, agreed. She does demonstrate rather thoroughly just how slandered and libeled the Puritans have been over the years, and how forward thinking and free their laws and behaviors were, especially in their time.
Though I appreciate her passionate defense of old concepts (mind, soul, etc) that she perceives to be under attack by science (or scientism -- she here, again, does well to distinguish between those who keep science in its proper place as a method rather than letting it drift into becoming a metaphysics) she does also fall into that peril of perhaps overplaying her hand. The God of the Gaps is not in need of rehabilitation, and though she'd deny this is what she is attempting, there are places where this comes off as what she's saying.
Certainly a collection worth engaging.
I also took these notes midway in my listen to the audiobook:
"Some excellent stuff, great points abound. She’s especially strong on scientism. Her historical details are also useful, though it’s usually one trick: we think badly of this person or group of persons, but fail to consider the world background against which they are arrayed. A worthy reminder, though always too prone to be misused by those with less noble intentions than MR.
Another frustration: perhaps a little besotted by that great failure, Obama, she can’t quite shed some weak thinking because of her centrism. She often mischaracterizes the left, or, perhaps worse, throws up her hands in frustration that, for example, no one now seems to ever talk about what a rotten person Winston Churchill was, and vastly overrated as a leader. This gem is not 2 or 3 paragraphs away from a derisive aside at “Marxians”. Sigh. MR, if you could get over your “pox on both your houses” / “I alone have seen things clear” pride (yes, I do think there is pride there) you would know, be familiar with the fact that, in fact, we on the Left rather universally do deride Churchill, not only for his silly speeches and the destructive arc he set us on after WW2, but also for the breathtaking horrors of his racism which he unleashed into actual genocide. You aren’t alone on this, and even if that will make you feel a little less special, perhaps you could just come on over and join in solidarity and work for a better world? (She does somewhat atone in a later essay on the purpose of higher education where she sketches out the many irrationalities of this supposedly rational system. She does at least have the proper amount of contempt for mainstream economists. (That is, a lot.))"
Her attempted rehabilitation of the Puritans and their legacy is refreshing, especially when she can resist the urge of patting herself on the back for it. One of her signature moves in the collection is to insist that we must understand movements and thinkers (Flavell, Jonathan Edwards, Calvin) in their context and against the background of their times. Fine, agreed. She does demonstrate rather thoroughly just how slandered and libeled the Puritans have been over the years, and how forward thinking and free their laws and behaviors were, especially in their time.
Though I appreciate her passionate defense of old concepts (mind, soul, etc) that she perceives to be under attack by science (or scientism -- she here, again, does well to distinguish between those who keep science in its proper place as a method rather than letting it drift into becoming a metaphysics) she does also fall into that peril of perhaps overplaying her hand. The God of the Gaps is not in need of rehabilitation, and though she'd deny this is what she is attempting, there are places where this comes off as what she's saying.
Certainly a collection worth engaging.
I also took these notes midway in my listen to the audiobook:
"Some excellent stuff, great points abound. She’s especially strong on scientism. Her historical details are also useful, though it’s usually one trick: we think badly of this person or group of persons, but fail to consider the world background against which they are arrayed. A worthy reminder, though always too prone to be misused by those with less noble intentions than MR.
Another frustration: perhaps a little besotted by that great failure, Obama, she can’t quite shed some weak thinking because of her centrism. She often mischaracterizes the left, or, perhaps worse, throws up her hands in frustration that, for example, no one now seems to ever talk about what a rotten person Winston Churchill was, and vastly overrated as a leader. This gem is not 2 or 3 paragraphs away from a derisive aside at “Marxians”. Sigh. MR, if you could get over your “pox on both your houses” / “I alone have seen things clear” pride (yes, I do think there is pride there) you would know, be familiar with the fact that, in fact, we on the Left rather universally do deride Churchill, not only for his silly speeches and the destructive arc he set us on after WW2, but also for the breathtaking horrors of his racism which he unleashed into actual genocide. You aren’t alone on this, and even if that will make you feel a little less special, perhaps you could just come on over and join in solidarity and work for a better world? (She does somewhat atone in a later essay on the purpose of higher education where she sketches out the many irrationalities of this supposedly rational system. She does at least have the proper amount of contempt for mainstream economists. (That is, a lot.))"
March 7, 2018
Short Review: I picked this up because of James KA Smith's review in Comment. That review is excellent. This book I think is less than excellent. I really do love Robinson's writing. She is a great writer and a wide ranging thinker. I love how wide ranging she is. At one point she is talking about another author writing outside of their main field and quips that she isn't going to complain about that since she frequently does the same thing.
But as an essayist I find her unpersuasive, maybe because I start many of her essays already agreeing with her basic point. Smith suggests that she is his favorite Calvinist liberal. Maybe I appreciate her less because I tend to be liberal socially and politically already.
I am also done with her defense of Jonathan Edwards and Puritanism. I get it. She thinks they are critiqued unfairly. But I think she isn't reading JI Packer and the couple of generations of Reformed Evangelicals since then that have rediscovered them. There are reasons that Puritans should be critiqued, not unfairly, because there is reasons to listen to them as well. But she is not balanced here. Many abolitionists may have come from Puritan backgrounds, but may others from Puritan backgrounds were happy to make money from slavery or banking or shipping that was significantly influenced by slavery. And once slavery was over was happy to deny full inclusion of African Americans within Northeastern society. It isn't unfair to the Puritans to grapple with how their pietism was not sufficient to communicate their faith to their children and grandchildren well. Or how they did not not live up to their ideals well.
There is also a lot of repetition here. Same quotes and same ideas in different essays. There could have been better editing or development of the ideas in a ways that had less repetition.
I think this is a case where the book is less than the individual essays. Many of the essays are good. But as a collection they are weak. She is, as an essayist, fairly unpersuasive and I am inclined to agree with her before I started reading. So I am at roughly the same place I was after the last book of essays. I will read any of her novels, but I probably won't read any more of her essays. d
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/what-are-we-doing-here/
But as an essayist I find her unpersuasive, maybe because I start many of her essays already agreeing with her basic point. Smith suggests that she is his favorite Calvinist liberal. Maybe I appreciate her less because I tend to be liberal socially and politically already.
I am also done with her defense of Jonathan Edwards and Puritanism. I get it. She thinks they are critiqued unfairly. But I think she isn't reading JI Packer and the couple of generations of Reformed Evangelicals since then that have rediscovered them. There are reasons that Puritans should be critiqued, not unfairly, because there is reasons to listen to them as well. But she is not balanced here. Many abolitionists may have come from Puritan backgrounds, but may others from Puritan backgrounds were happy to make money from slavery or banking or shipping that was significantly influenced by slavery. And once slavery was over was happy to deny full inclusion of African Americans within Northeastern society. It isn't unfair to the Puritans to grapple with how their pietism was not sufficient to communicate their faith to their children and grandchildren well. Or how they did not not live up to their ideals well.
There is also a lot of repetition here. Same quotes and same ideas in different essays. There could have been better editing or development of the ideas in a ways that had less repetition.
I think this is a case where the book is less than the individual essays. Many of the essays are good. But as a collection they are weak. She is, as an essayist, fairly unpersuasive and I am inclined to agree with her before I started reading. So I am at roughly the same place I was after the last book of essays. I will read any of her novels, but I probably won't read any more of her essays. d
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/what-are-we-doing-here/
January 9, 2021
“So, beauty disciplines. It recommends a best word in a best place and makes the difference palpable between aesthetic right and wrong. And it does this freely, within the limits it finds—cultural, material, genetic. Another paradox, perhaps, a discipline that is itself free, and free to make variations on such limits as it does choose to embrace. Beauty is like language in this. It can push at the borders of intelligibility and create new eloquence as it does so.” — “Grace and Beauty”
If I trust anyone to tell us what we are doing here, it may be Marilynne Robinson. Her wise, far-ranging mind considers American history, Christian theology, redemption of the Puritans, and a smattering of politics in this heady collection of essays. (Her tribute to President Obama and their sweet friendship was a particular delight.) It was a pleasure to read someone with her depth of thought, wit, and high vocabulary on topics that are dismissible at first glance as dry and unappealing. In her talented hands, everything becomes a subject of wonder.
“The mind, that most luxuriant flowering of the highest possibilities of the material world, likes to natter and mope and trivialize itself. We let an astonishing fertility run to weeds.” — “Considering the Theological Virtues”
May 4, 2023
This is not a bad set of essays from Robinson, but it wouldn’t be the first set I would recommend to others. As always, Robinson remains thoughtful and delightful to read, even whileI find myself disagreeing with her. The essays “Theology for this moment” and “The Sacred, The Human” were particularly thought provoking.
September 15, 2020
I enjoyed most of the essays but all of them required my full attention and a lot of mental energy to get through. Not a bad thing, it’s just that Robinson is very very smart.
April 25, 2018
Marilynne Robinson alerts us in the introduction to her collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here?, that she is “too old to mince words.”
While we can remind her that she also fully partakes of the tendency of the elderly to repeat themselves, we need to concede that some of what she repeats is eminently worth hearing — for instance, her passionate argument against turning America’s colleges and universities into business schools and training programs and in favor of currently devalued liberal arts curricula.
It needs to be said, however, that these essays can be pretty hard to read and are sometimes hard to take, as when she tries to get this one by us: “It would be a great presumption on my part to generalize, farther, at least , than to say that the highest intellectual and aesthetic achievements of every culture I know of seem to be associated with and addressed to their highest disciplines of religion, to their theology.” Many a reader, including this one, will want to reply that this is already a great presumption. (What are you doing there, Robinson? Perhaps trying to set yourself up as a writer whose achievements are among the rare highest of our time?)
Most of these essays were originally developed as lectures, and they too often get weighed down by the strained and/or flaunted erudition that I still remember from a symposium on existentialism I endured as an undergraduate. That grueling symposium was occasionally relieved by humor or wit, qualities that are disturbingly hard to find in Robinson’s essays. Well, we are dealing with an essayist who hangs her hat (her claim, not mine) on a word like “entelechy,” and that’s that.
Can I be forgiven if when I came to her “The Beautiful Changes,” I imagined it being delivered aloud by Professor Irwin Corey?
Robinson is at her best when she comes down from her pulpit and is more matter of fact, as in “The American Scholar Now,” and when she is less focused on religion and theology, as in “Grace and Beauty.” In the latter essay, writing about a recently discovered secondary human immune system, she almost casually and rather endearingly begins one sentence with the expression “since nature is elegant.”
One of the most engaging essays,“Our Public Conversation,” in which she notes that she has “arrived at the conclusion that American history is substantially false …,” disinters the fact that Tsarist Russia sent troops to support the Union during the American Civil War and that they may have been critical to the outcome. From that same essay: “Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely.”
“A Proof, A Test, An Instruction,“ one of the few essays that did not originate as a lecture, is a thoughtful and appreciative consideration of Barack Obama that first appeared in the pages of The Nation.
As a reader, I do not often skim, but this book eventually forced me.
I would be remiss not to point out that Robinson’s novels are another matter. There her grounding in religion and theology deepens her, she is saved and made larger by the rigors and challenges of fictive method, and she indeed occupies a unique position among all living American novelists I know of. I particularly recommend her 2004 novel Gilead, which deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize.
While we can remind her that she also fully partakes of the tendency of the elderly to repeat themselves, we need to concede that some of what she repeats is eminently worth hearing — for instance, her passionate argument against turning America’s colleges and universities into business schools and training programs and in favor of currently devalued liberal arts curricula.
It needs to be said, however, that these essays can be pretty hard to read and are sometimes hard to take, as when she tries to get this one by us: “It would be a great presumption on my part to generalize, farther, at least , than to say that the highest intellectual and aesthetic achievements of every culture I know of seem to be associated with and addressed to their highest disciplines of religion, to their theology.” Many a reader, including this one, will want to reply that this is already a great presumption. (What are you doing there, Robinson? Perhaps trying to set yourself up as a writer whose achievements are among the rare highest of our time?)
Most of these essays were originally developed as lectures, and they too often get weighed down by the strained and/or flaunted erudition that I still remember from a symposium on existentialism I endured as an undergraduate. That grueling symposium was occasionally relieved by humor or wit, qualities that are disturbingly hard to find in Robinson’s essays. Well, we are dealing with an essayist who hangs her hat (her claim, not mine) on a word like “entelechy,” and that’s that.
Can I be forgiven if when I came to her “The Beautiful Changes,” I imagined it being delivered aloud by Professor Irwin Corey?
Robinson is at her best when she comes down from her pulpit and is more matter of fact, as in “The American Scholar Now,” and when she is less focused on religion and theology, as in “Grace and Beauty.” In the latter essay, writing about a recently discovered secondary human immune system, she almost casually and rather endearingly begins one sentence with the expression “since nature is elegant.”
One of the most engaging essays,“Our Public Conversation,” in which she notes that she has “arrived at the conclusion that American history is substantially false …,” disinters the fact that Tsarist Russia sent troops to support the Union during the American Civil War and that they may have been critical to the outcome. From that same essay: “Consensus really ought not to trump reason or preclude it, though it does, routinely.”
“A Proof, A Test, An Instruction,“ one of the few essays that did not originate as a lecture, is a thoughtful and appreciative consideration of Barack Obama that first appeared in the pages of The Nation.
As a reader, I do not often skim, but this book eventually forced me.
I would be remiss not to point out that Robinson’s novels are another matter. There her grounding in religion and theology deepens her, she is saved and made larger by the rigors and challenges of fictive method, and she indeed occupies a unique position among all living American novelists I know of. I particularly recommend her 2004 novel Gilead, which deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize.
April 12, 2018
I had never read anything by Marilynne Robinson before I read this new book of essays by her. Having done so, I must acknowledge that I now need to read more books by this author, probably starting with her novel, Gilead. This is a marvelous book of essays on humanism, religion, metaphysics, ethics, Puritanism, writing, conscience, and plain old critical thinking. These essays are challenging, well thought through and rigorous, and demanding on the reader. I felt like I was under increasing pressure to keep up with the author’s thoughts, references, and linkages - along with some concern about my ability to do so. The essays are fairly short and well written. They are challenging. If there is some repetition over the course of these assembled essays, that is OK, since apparently the Robinson has taken the idea of “practice makes perfect” to heart in working up her arguments across several works.
I could not possibly rehash or summarize the ideas at play here. I can mention a few highlights that caught my attention.
1). Ideology and dogma are substitutes for careful critical thinking and should be avoided if one is seeking out the truth - or at least its general neighborhood.
2) The sciences of the mind (psychology, economics, etc.) are poor substitutes for what we have long known about the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, and accountability to conscience. Because empirical research can highlight some set of behaviors does not mean that less visible experiences or unimportant are less valuable.
3) Indeed, the new sciences of the mind have attempted to banish values and principled choices from people’s lives leading to a progressive improvishment of our common life. This is not to say that science is the enemy at all but that some scientists act more like theocrats than do actual theocrats.
4) The Puritans got a bad rap nearly across the board and revisiting Jonathan Edwards and others of the Great Awakening would be a worthwhile effort for thinking people to consider.
5) The Puritans and others similarly maligned wanted individuals to be true to their own consciences, critical in their own thinking, and unwilling to entertain and own thoughts that they would not wish to own on their deathbeds (I am still processing this one). To thine own self be true - or something like that. It is perfectly fine to think about theology and ethics and metaphysics - just do so critically and honestly. The point is to live what one believes, walk the walk, etc.
Robinson’s essays are thoughtful, interesting, and challenging in their demands. I will certainly read more of her work and see what its further implications are for me.
I could not possibly rehash or summarize the ideas at play here. I can mention a few highlights that caught my attention.
1). Ideology and dogma are substitutes for careful critical thinking and should be avoided if one is seeking out the truth - or at least its general neighborhood.
2) The sciences of the mind (psychology, economics, etc.) are poor substitutes for what we have long known about the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, and accountability to conscience. Because empirical research can highlight some set of behaviors does not mean that less visible experiences or unimportant are less valuable.
3) Indeed, the new sciences of the mind have attempted to banish values and principled choices from people’s lives leading to a progressive improvishment of our common life. This is not to say that science is the enemy at all but that some scientists act more like theocrats than do actual theocrats.
4) The Puritans got a bad rap nearly across the board and revisiting Jonathan Edwards and others of the Great Awakening would be a worthwhile effort for thinking people to consider.
5) The Puritans and others similarly maligned wanted individuals to be true to their own consciences, critical in their own thinking, and unwilling to entertain and own thoughts that they would not wish to own on their deathbeds (I am still processing this one). To thine own self be true - or something like that. It is perfectly fine to think about theology and ethics and metaphysics - just do so critically and honestly. The point is to live what one believes, walk the walk, etc.
Robinson’s essays are thoughtful, interesting, and challenging in their demands. I will certainly read more of her work and see what its further implications are for me.
February 4, 2018
This was one of my free giveaways win. it took me a bit of time to read this as yes it isn't a story it is essays written by Marilynne Robinson. If you are a christen who believes in the bible this is a really informative of why we are here and how the past and future follows the teaching of the bible and in God and Jesus Christ and the teachings of mankind. (love, conscience and faith, hope and the practices of life). I took alot out of these essays but it didn't change alot of my mind set. I believe that all mankind are born with a blank and clean slate. That all values of God, religion, faith, etc are taught by the person that raises them. Each person passes on their beliefs and knowledge by what they are taught and told. Now don't get me wrong i am not saying it is wrong. but i believe there is a greater power that controls all life rather it is human, animal etc. But do i believe that it is a man or a spirit i don't know. I have seen the good in religion and i have experienced the bad in religion. Do i believe there is life after death, i honestly have to say i don't know. All i know is I pray I haven't gone through all the hell i have lived and experienced the good to think that when i die it is the end. that there hopefully is more to existence then complete death but do i believe it is a place that is a question i will only know when I die. Religions have changed and more so to suit the living and as life changes so much of the teachings changes with the times.
March 6, 2018
I just LOVE Marilynne Robinson. This is to say that my review is surely biased.
I’ll be brief. If you’re bored by those subjects to which Robinson *religiously* gravitates—Puritanism, critiques of positivism, Western history, theology, etc.—then yeah, you might find this book unenjoyable, but also frustrating and challenging, which you might find ultimately satisfying.
She repeats herself. Revisits the same subjects and figures, occasionally the same insights. The reason, that these essays first appeared as lectures delivered to different audiences, doesn’t change the experience of the her new audience, the reader of this book of collected essays. But, as I’ve said, her thought is challenging, so I found myself appreciating the repetition. By the fourth or fifth essay, I felt more confident in my mental construction of the intellectual historical lineage from England to New England.
I also felt I saw the bigger picture of Robinson’s position on the world. As a devoted fan, I appreciate as much insight into Robinson’s viewpoint as I can.
If you’re a Robinson fan, proceed. If unfamiliar with Robinson but familiar with her addressed subjects, then I also recommend you proceed. It’s difficult, but ultimately rewarding.
I’ll be brief. If you’re bored by those subjects to which Robinson *religiously* gravitates—Puritanism, critiques of positivism, Western history, theology, etc.—then yeah, you might find this book unenjoyable, but also frustrating and challenging, which you might find ultimately satisfying.
She repeats herself. Revisits the same subjects and figures, occasionally the same insights. The reason, that these essays first appeared as lectures delivered to different audiences, doesn’t change the experience of the her new audience, the reader of this book of collected essays. But, as I’ve said, her thought is challenging, so I found myself appreciating the repetition. By the fourth or fifth essay, I felt more confident in my mental construction of the intellectual historical lineage from England to New England.
I also felt I saw the bigger picture of Robinson’s position on the world. As a devoted fan, I appreciate as much insight into Robinson’s viewpoint as I can.
If you’re a Robinson fan, proceed. If unfamiliar with Robinson but familiar with her addressed subjects, then I also recommend you proceed. It’s difficult, but ultimately rewarding.
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