May 2011
18 posts
2005 Interview with Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly →
Here’s an earlier interview with “R&LNW.”
I have a feeling that there has been a pressure away from seriousness in much modern thought, as if we could sort of scale reality down to a size that we are more comfortable dealing with. That might be a prejudice, but I feel that we have not come up to the standards of seriousness that others have reached at earlier moments. The...
2009 Interview with Bob Abernathy →
I like what she says here, talking to PBS’s “Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly,” about the relationship between belief and nonbelief:
Atheism is such a longstanding tradition in Christian culture that I think it’s a necessary part of the conversation, and I have every kind of respect for somebody like Bertrand Russell or any considered atheist. I really think that to explore the...
April 2011
29 posts
Meeting Marilynne Robinson →
A great profile from The Economist, ca. Home.
The Psalms With Robert Alter and Marilynne... →
Robert “The Guy Who Taught Me How To Read the Pentateuch” Alter discusses translating the Psalms. Then Robinson discusses reading them. It’s kinda like knowing that the Clash once shared a stage with Prince.
Unfortunately, the first face that pops up on YouTube’s “Up Next” screen after this clip finishes is Bernard Henry-Levy’s. That sort of harshed my...
The Homecoming →
… and here is James Wood’s review of Home from 2008.
And here is James Wood drumming with his fingers while his adorable kid plays around in the background. Sort of sets his admiration for the Who’s Keith Moon in a new context.
Robinson seems to return Wood’s admiration. In one interview she mentions reading and enjoying his novel The Book Against God, because, you know,...
Acts of Devotion →
Speaking of James Wood, here is his lovely review of Gilead, from 2004 …
RSA Debate on “New” “Atheism” →
I’m so sick of typing those words. After reading the comments on this video, I begin to suspect that the whole (no-more-) New (-than-Herbert-Spenser) Atheist movement exists to give Internet trolling a new dimension of sanctimony.
I mean, philosophically literate, humanistic atheists are some of the awesomest people on earth. I prefer them to most religious people. I thank God for such...
2009 National Book Festival →
For the first twenty-eight minutes or so, she reads from Home, for those of you who like that sort of thing. (Me, I’d rather read the book my damn self.) But there’s a nice Q&A at the end.
Interview by William Storrar →
Robinson talks to the Director of the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton about a workshop she gave for theology students looking to write for a nonspecialized audience.
“Theology always needs to be written again,” she says at one point, sounding beautifully Barthian.
About the Curators
It’s been about a month now since we put this site together. If you’ve been wondering who to blame for this, here we are.
Christian Bell lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his lovely wife Beth and some cats. He is a web designer for a non-profit organization, a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church, and holds an MA in Educational Ministry from Calvin Theological Seminary. He occasionally...
The Tyranny of Petty Coercion (Extended Mix) →
The original, longer, and (I think) better version of ‘The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,’ which, truncated, appeared in Harpers in 2004 and in the last paperback printing of The Death of Adam. None of what she had to say in TDOA would have been complete without a full-throated condemnation of the Fraught Naughts, so this essay is essential.
Here is an instance: for some time the word “bashing” has...
Review of Annie Dillard's The Maytrees →
Robinson has sometimes mentioned Annie Dillard as one of the few contemporary writers she follows closely. If you scroll down here, you can read Robinson’s very insightful review of Annie Dillard’s 2007 novel The Maytrees, originally published in the now-defunct Washington Post Book World.
…Her language in this book can recall Gerard Manley Hopkins, both in its use of compression to...
Waiting to be Remembered →
This is from the Amherst alumni magazine. And it’s really, really good, besides being an invaluable account of the genesis of Mother Country, and the whole period Robinson spent reading every book mentioned in the footnotes to Marx’s Capital. (Yes, that happened.)
Judging from this, I would guess that Marilynne Robinson also signs a helluva yearbook. “Dear So-and-So, As often as...
My Western Roots →
When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and dull and hard. I made vocabulary lists. … Relevance was precisely not an issue for me. I looked to Galilee for meaning and to Spokane for orthodonture, and beyond that the world where I was I found entirely sufficient.
I tell my students that relevance is sought-for, imagined,...
That Highest Candle →
A 2007 review of American Religious Poems, a Library of America volume edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba. (I bet the division of labor there was as follows: Bloom: “I’ll huff and puff about ‘agons’ for five or ten pages and you’ll do all the hard stuff.” Zuba: “Yessir, Mr. Famous Literary Pundit!”)
As always, in Robinson’s nonfiction, she...
The Making of a King →
She’s done so much else, it’s easy to forget Robinson’s academic training is as a Shakespeare scholar. Here, from 2003, is a smart, tough reading of the Henry IV Part One-Henry IV Part Two-Henry V cycle. We often hear that Shakespeare read the Geneva Bible (as we hear that he read Golding’s Ovid), but we don’t often see readings of Shakespeare that trace the results...
Marilynne Robinson goes to Princeton
In my senior year of college, I set my heart on going to Princeton Theological Seminary for grad school. My then-fiancée (now wife) and I drove east the week of spring break to visit the PTS campus. And a beautiful campus it is, just as you imagine — all the way through the ivy vines slithering up the sides of those stately brick buildings. Although I ended up going to that other Calvinist...
Freed →
The last of Robinson’s NYT/NYTBR pieces so far: from 2005, a review of two books detailing the end of the slave trade in Britain. Robinson argues that the British have less ground for moral self-congratulation on this issue than they like to think, a running theme with her.
I’m assuming, having read this, that she finds less point in the famous witticism of Samuel...
Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy →
I wondered how long it would take before my project of linking to all of Robinson’s New York Times work would run afoul of the Times’ strange new “paying for things” plan. This sparkling 1985 entry in that odd, tired discussion, “Why don’t Americans write political novels?”, knocks the props out from under the question and gets in a solid dig at Mr....
Beyond the Pale with Edgar Allan Poe →
Writers, like single friends invited to a dinner party, never match up with the people they’re “supposed” to. For example, here’s Marilynne Robinson enthusing over the author of “Ligeia:”
It seems to me, reading Poe, that his subject is the alienation of consciousness from experience by the estheticized, the idealized, the formal—an alienation not peculiar to colonial people but certainly...
