If I could have lunch with anyone in the U.S. and spend an hour or two chatting with them, I am pretty sure I would choose Marilynne Robinson. The author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and now Lila, Robinson is an amazing writer, a voracious reader, and she possesses a fierce intellect. I’m convinced that she is one of the smartest persons in the U.S.
Furthermore, she is a Christian.
So I was glad that Christianity Today published a profile about her. More Christians need to know about her and read her works. (Her theological views seem to lie outside of evangelical commitments. But she should still be read.) She needs to be introduced to a wider audience.
The article isn’t very long, but let me leave you with a few quotations to motivate you to read it.
The Sense of the Divine
“I have read and loved a lot of literature about religion and religious experience – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, the Bible,” Mark O’Connell writes in The New Yorker,“but it’s only with Robinson that I have actually felt what it must be like to live with a sense of the divine.”
Robinson’s Wide Reading
“I was the ideal student of no one,” Robinson remarked, “I read the books that everybody talks about as if they had read them, Wealth of Nations, Capital, the essays of Sigmund Freud.”
Grace and Popularity
“I believe in the grace of God,” Reverend Ames tells Lila, his wife, who, though settled in Gilead, struggles to feel at home, and worries what will become of the people who raised her; the people she loved, none of whom gave much thought to their immortal souls. “For me, that is where all questions end.”
Perhaps Robinson’s popularity isn’t “weird” at all. Perhaps our culture simply craves more grace. That’s heartening, and a challenge.
You can read the entire article here: Marilynne Robinson: Calvinist on the Bestseller List
Join other dedicated readers of Thinking and Believing and subscribe to the email list. You'll receive every new post in your inbox, so you never have to worry about missing a post. Click here to subscribe.
