April 29, 2008
Marilynne Robinson, then and now
The contributors to Reading Room, the New York Times blog dedicated to discussing books in depth, are currently focusing their energies upon Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping. Click here for the moderator's introductory post.
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, one of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I typed up a portion of my notes and e-mailed them to Patrick Kurp, of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, and he excerpted them online in this post:
Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand "why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them." She then asserted that "if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith" and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that "those who attack faith devalue thought." Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that "an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God," said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the "shining garment of reality" in which God reveals himself constantly.
Lastly, an excerpt of Robinson's 2007 commencement-day speech at Amherst has been published in the current issue of Harper's. The full text of the speech, titled "Waiting to Be Remembered," is available online at Amherst magazine.