The Givenness Of Things

by Marilynne Robinson

A profound new essay collection from the beloved author of Gilead, Houskeeping, and Lila


Grace, our redemption in this fallen world, the unexpected and unconditional forgiveness that God bestows on us and that we struggle to bestow on each other, is at the heart of Marilynne Robinson’s The Givenness of Things. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit both in her novels, including the bestselling Lila and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead, and in her moving and insightful essay collections When I Was a Child I Read Books and The Death of Adam.
     In The Givenness of Things, she brings a profound sense of awe and an incisive mind to the essential questions of contemporary faith. Through fourteen essays of remarkable depth and insight, Robinson explores the dilemmas of our modern predicament and the mysteries of Christianity. How has our so-called Christian nation strayed from so many of the teachings of Christ? How could the great minds of the past, Calvin and Locke—and Shakespeare—guide our lives? And what might the world look like if we could see the sacredness in each other, how the kingdom of God is actually among us?
     Exquisite and bold, these essays are a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in the life of Christ and in Scripture itself, to seek humanity and compassion in each other. The Givenness of Things is a reminder of what a marvel our existence is in its grandeur—and its humility.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Spirituality, Christianity

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2015

About the author

American 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.

Reviews

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

How I love unconventional people that formulate their own, valuable insights in a powerful, straightforward way, even if I do not necessarily agree with their opinions. The well-known American writer Marilynne Robinson is someone like that. In this book she repeatedly states that she’s glad she has reached the age of 70 and does not have to take into account conventions or the perception of other people anymore. Thus, she has produced a particularly rich book, in which she reworked a number of lectures she gave on various subjects during the period 2010-2015. Some of these are inquiries into her own time, about cultural pessimism (for her the internet is the salvation of literacy!), the pest of market thinking and the disappearance of generosity in American society.

But the most interesting (and I also add much more difficult) essays are on science and religion. In almost every essay, Robinson settles a score with the reductionist nature of natural sciences: through positivism reality is impoverished and harbored into a small shell; within this shielded part of the reality those sciences indeed perform useful work; but through their universalistic pretensions, and their stubborn habit of infinitely extrapolating that limited world, they dodge the much and much greater reality that surrounds us. Robinson points to the many areas where positivism can not say anything about, like the mystery of time, the mystery of evil, and especially the human mind, the "self" (the neurosciences that reduce it to the brain with its physiological processes are ruthlessly chopped up by her).

Robinson repeatedly pleads to re-value the deeply human, subjective experiences. And so she comes to religion: in religion, the deep human intuition is expressed that there is much more than tangible reality, and that our human existence is embedded in a much broader context, of which it is very difficult to speak, but that does not mean that this intuition is less valuable. Every human, when he/she is honest, must confess that there is so much we don't know about or don't understand, but somehow we have an intuition about a much broader connectedness, beyond what is objectively expressable. In religions these experiences have been given a proper expression, in a very own, delicate language.

Robinson professes to be profoundly Christian, and she knows that in our time that is a real provocation. Now, better don't place her within the so-called Christian fundamentalism in the US (which is more of a social and political movement); her source of inspiration is apparently Jean Calvin, the 16th Century Swiss Reformist thinker, known for his theories on predestination and original sin, but to Robinson he offers so much more than that. And, curiously, she also sees Shakespeare as a Christian writer (she even calls him an outstanding theologian), which is an angle I have not yet met anywhere else.

Again, this is a particularly rich book, with many valuable insights and, as already stated, written without scruples. But at the same time it is also a really difficult read, due to the sometimes very extensive theological wording and the extreme condensed way of writing (although I suspect that also the Dutch translation I read is to blame for this). Marilynne Robinson, I salute and honor you as one of the most interesting writers of our time! (3 1/2 stars)

[Cam · Rating 5 out of 5]

we don't deserve this woman.

[Melora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging, in the both senses of the word, and illuminating. Also, occasionally, a bit obscure, although that might be my fault rather than Robinson's. Still, though her writing is dense, it is good, and her ideas and arguments are eminently worth taking the time to follow and consider. I enjoyed this tremendously. It's not a quick read, and a couple of the essays lost me at points (“Metaphysics,” particularly), and “Fear” got a little “ranty,” but Marilynne Robinson sure does make me think!

She covers a great range of topics in this collection of seventeen essays. I jotted down a list of things she'd talked about over the course of the book, and these are all on it: quantum physics, Shakespeare, John Calvin, Puritans, Bonhoeffer, ontology, consciousness, the soul, Providence, grace, reality, time, space, American politics. As I said, a lot of territory. And that's just some of it.

She starts, appropriately, with an essay called “Humanism,” in which, in part, she contrasts the mysterious, creative powers of the human mind with the mechanistic certainties of neuroscience (pardon my simplification, as her argument is not “anti-science” at all).

”In any case, the spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. This spirit is not the consequence but the cause of our present state of affairs. We have as good grounds for exulting in human brilliance as any generation that has ever lived.
The antidote to our gloom is to be found in contemporary science.... The phenomenon called quantum entanglement, relatively old as theory, and thoroughly demonstrated as fact, raises fundamental questions about time and space, and therefore about causality.
Particles that are “entangled,” however distant from one another, undergo the same changes simultaneously. This fact challenges our most deeply embedded habits of thought.... Mathematics, ontology, and metaphysics have become one thing. Einstein's universe seems mechanistic in comparison, Newton's, the work of a tinkerer. If Galileo shocked the world by removing the sun from its place, so to speak, then this polyglot army of mathematicians and cosmologists who offer always new grounds for new conceptions of absolute reality should dazzle us all, freeing us at last from the circle of old Urizen's compass. But we are not free.”

*I had to look “Urizen” up. He's an evil god in William Blake's mythology, who works to thwart mankind's potential through arbitrary laws and limits.

Along with science (often quite literally “along with”), with its particle physics, dark matter, time, etc., Robinson spends quite a lot of time with people like Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin. I have to say that if anyone could make John Calvin appealing to an Episcopalian, it would be Marilynne Robinson. (It's only fair to note that she says “I admire Calvin more than I do any of the Calvinists, Edwards included.” (p 87) While she takes sin seriously, she focuses on the wonder of creation, and on grace and love, skipping lightly past predestination, and giving total depravity and limited atonement a complete miss.)

She is open about her liberal politics, but also recognizes that many on the “other side” are also working from sincere religious convictions.

”Some, in the fear of God, could never knowingly vote against the interests of the poor or of those who suffer discrimination, while others, in the fear of God, are content that the poor should be with us always, and would never vote for marriage equality. The very high standard of responsibility Lovejoy (a Congregationalist minister and friend of Abraham Lincoln, who gave an antislavery speech in 1842) articulates has the effect of making political differences intractable. I will say at the outset that I do not find any slightest inclination in myself to make concessions, precisely because I attach religious value to generous, need I say liberal, social policy. If it would be illiberal and unchristian of me to suppose that divine judgment might be brought down on the United States for grinding the faces of the poor (despite all the great prophet Isaiah has to say on the subject), I take no comfort from the certain knowledge that my opposite is struggling with just the same temptation, through mulling other texts.”

Despite the last quotation I included (it seemed right to indicate that the book does have a political slant, though I came across a nice article from The American Conservative, October 15, 2013, on her, so she does have admirers across the political spectrum), she is really not “ranty,” for the most part, or negative. She actually notes much that is good and encouraging in American culture.

”Still, our towns and cities build great libraries, love them, and people them. Still, the good and generous work of teaching goes on, much of it unpaid, and much, underpaid. There are legislatures and institutions who exploit the willingness of many people to teach despite meager salaries, overwork, and insecurity, and this is disgraceful. But it should not obscure the fact that there are indeed people teaching for the love of it. They are the ones sustaining civilization, not the exploiters of their good faith, or, better, their good grace.... They are, of course, a synecdoche for millions of people who work without recognition or adequate pay and contribute vastly more to the common life than the vulgarians who exploit them or the cynics who dismiss them.”

The last few essays, particularly “Limitation,” where she focuses on the miracle of the Incarnation, were among my favorites, but they are pretty much all excellent. This, from “Limitation,” will give an idea of how she sees God's providential care in the limitations our senses and conceptual abilities place on us…

There is an element of the arbitrary in our experience of life on earth – nonsymmetrical time, weak gravity, and the physical properties of matter that are artifacts of the scale at which we perceive. Out of such things is constructed a reality sufficient to our flourishing, even while we are immersed in a greater reality whose warp and woof are profoundly unlike anything we experience. I am drawn to Calvin's description of this world as a theater, with the implication that a strong and particular intention is expressed in it, that its limits, its boundedness, are meant to let meaning be isolated out of the indecipherable weather of the universe at large. A flicker of energy in the great void may dissipate in those oceans, but a flicker of energy in the small space of a human brain interacts with a mind's history, expresses and changes a human self…

Locke (John) would be interested to know what we can do with 0 and 1, what nature does with A, C, G, and T. Locke makes the point beautifully that our limits are entirely consistent with our transcending them, and so it is with limitation itself wherever it occurs in this strangely constructed world. In effect limitation could be understood as leverage, a highly efficient multiplier of possibility that creates and gives access to our largest capabilities. This would no doubt seem a mighty paradox, if we were not so thoroughly accustomed to the truth of it.”

This won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed it very much.

[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved these patient essays. Perfect for any devout atheist who doesn't see why anyone would look to Christianity, or anyone who wants to see a much more thoughtful Christianity than the hateful version we've become so used to in politics and the news.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If we are to be blindsided by history, it will probably be the consequence not of unresolved disputes but of unexamined consensus.”

In which Marilynne Robinson says everything I want to say about being both a free-thinking progressive and a self-identifying Christian. Five stars for a handful of the essays, which are luminous and so wise. A few I found a bit dry and tedious (the obsession with John Calvin is something I don't totally understand).

Favorite essays:
“Humanism”
“Awakening”
“Decline”
“Memory”
“Value”
“Fear”

Recommended particularly to American Christians, especially the ones who want to use their minds.

[James Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, I half expected not to like this but was taken aback by the force of her prose and the breadth of her theological vision. The politics are predictable, but also something I could look past. A marvelous collection that reminds you what the essay can do.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

The spirit of the times is one of joyless urgency, many of us preparing ourselves and our children to be means to inscrutable ends that are utterly not our own. In such an environment the humanities do seem to have little place. They are poor preparation for economic servitude. This spirit is not the consequence but the cause of our present state of affairs.

I think that with this passage, Marilynne Robinson totally captures the spirit of the age: it seems to be a given that the legions of baristas with their humanities degrees are the epitome of waste; that they ought to have spent their education dollars on technical college or found themselves a viable trade. My facebook feed is equally divided between the people who uncritically quote the quasi-metaphysical Deepak Chopra and David Avocado Wolfe on the one hand and those who throw out the cold cynicism of Richard Dawkins and Ricky Gervais as “proof” against those who still believe in “fairytales about invisible sky gods”. People of faith are thought to be either fundamentalists who attempt to impose their beliefs on others or weak-minded dolts who say their prayers at night out of infantilism or nostalgia. In a world where God cannot be found on either radar or spectrogram – where absence of proof is assumed to be proof of absence – who has the courage to defend belief on purely intellectual terms? Marilynne Robinson does. And yet, as she made and defended her arguments in the seventeen essays in The Givenness of Things, quoting Erasmus and Calvin and Bonhoeffer, I so often couldn't quite follow along with her; and all because I have no proper rooting in the humanities – Bonhoeff-who?

I had an easier time of it when Robinson was talking science – as she often does, returning again and again to the unreality of quantum physics, gravity that's weaker than it ought to be, the unknowable nature of time; all topics which have long fascinated me – and I found myself in easy agreement with an argument like this one:

Neuroscientists seem predisposed to the conclusion that there is no “self”. This would account for the indifference to the modifying effects of individual history and experience, and to the quirks of the organism that arise from heredity, environment, interactions within the soma as a whole, and so on. What can the word “self” mean to those who wish to deny its reality? It can only signify an illusion we all participate in, as individuals, societies, and civilizations. So it must also be an important function of the brain, the brain aware of itself as it is modified by the infinite particulars of circumstance, that is, as it is not like others. But that would mean the self is not an illusion at all but a product of the mind at other work than the neuroscientists are inclined to acknowledge.

And if it's that easy to argue for the existence of “self”, is it really that large a leap to argue for the existence of other concepts (the soul or God) that we as humans can feel the reality of but cannot “prove” with current technology? (Perhaps I should note that I'm not personally religious – as I tend to think of religions as the imperfect constructions of imperfect humans – but that doesn't make me an atheist.)

I also connected to the bits about Shakespeare (on whom Robinson wrote her doctorate decades ago) and appreciated her argument in favour of seeing the Bard as a theologist; writing for a culture (including the so-called Groundlings) that understood the history of Western thought better than we do today. But again, my ignorance of the humanities/the classics didn't allow me to completely understand seeing the endings of the history plays as metaphors for grace; that Shakespeare told the story of Antony and Cleopatra, for example, in a way that would make his audience understand that the lovers had to die in order to see the rise of Augustus Caesar, which would then set the scene for the coming of Christ. I would never have made that connection and I am jealously resistant to the idea that the unwashed masses in Shakespeare's day would have known more than I do; and that's rather the point of this book.

As I was reading, I put multiple book darts in every essay, knowing I would want to come back and talk about all of them, but now that the book is done, I just want to restate what I found to be the main idea: In public conversations today (of which I find my facebook feed to be representative), it seems a given that people of faith are not too bright, but consider this: I've read that the cavemen who painted deer and bison on the walls at Lascaux, France some seventeen millenia ago had brains just like ours; we like to imagine them as dumb knuckle-draggers, but as their art proves, they were fully human. But if a modern rationalist were to speak to a cave-painter, demanding scientific proofs for the source of his artistic impetus, our caveman wouldn't have the language to defend his inspiration – and yet I'm sure he'd know that his being was more than a common piece of meat whose animating force was more than a random effect of evolution. In the past few millenia– even closer to modern day and even more analogous to our own brains – deep thinkers were able to meditate on and discover elegant proofs for the existence of the soul, of God(s). This history of thought – the humanities – has long been taught by intelligent people to intelligent people, and there was in Western culture a common language of belief. Yet in the past few hundred years, we have prioritised science (as though “science” and “faith” are mutually exclusive), and within the past generation, we have become utterly contemptuous of the humanities. Therefore, the modern person of faith has lost the language to defend his beliefs; he may as well be a caveman; he is certainly compared to one often enough.

In reading Marilynne Robinson's previous works – and especially Gilead and Lila – I often mentally checked out when characters would explain Calvinist ideas to one another; now I understand what the author was trying to achieve by this. Givenness is a rather dense work to get through – and most especially if, like me, you don't have the proper educational background with which to approach it – but I found it rewarding just the same; it was fascinating to read what has been the lifelong fascinations of an author I admire. And as I just recently read her first novel Housekeeping (which is commonly considered a work demonstrating the Transparent Eyeball metaphor of Emerson and Whitman) this passage felt especially meaningful to me right now:

I feel that I have been impoverished in the degree that I have allowed myself to be persuaded of the inevitability of a definition of the real that is so arbitrarily exclusive, leaving much of what I intuited and even what I knew in the limbo of the unarticulated and the unacknowledged. I wish I had experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.

If Robinson wishes she had experienced her “earthly life more deeply”, imagine how impoverished I feel right now. Yet, richer for having read this book.

[Il'ja Rákoš · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I were starting a seminary - Theological Seminary of St. Il'ja the Profane, say - I'd hire Marilynne Robinson for chair of the pastoral theology department. For those unfamiliar, all 'pastoral theology' means is the area of study where putative preachers learn to be human. Where they learn to set aside 'the Book' and deal with the person right in front of them.

I'd hire her for her sincerity, for the breadth and depth of her reading, and for the chance to tell folks in unguarded moments that I'm Marilynne Robinson's boss. And after I'd hired her I'd sit at her feet every damn day and learn what she had to teach.

More than a series of essays, "The Givenness of Things: Essays" is an extended contemplation on contemporary society and what the hell has gone wrong with it. For those who have read her previous essays and lectures - , , and - you will soon discover that Marilynne is hunting similar prey here. She includes familiar, necessary rebuttals of scientism and positivism; a succulent, layered response to the age-old question, i.e., 'why does God, being God, allow evil, suffering, death?'; elegant appeals for universalism; and, tucked away in a deeply moving essay on the humanity of Christ, a passage of great encouragement to those most easily marginalized in a world that's all about knowing, sans merci, the margins:

Chrysostom would have been speaking to...people who would have known the stigma of servitude and poverty, and the harshness and turbulence of ancient life. In their best moments such people were clearly worthy to shape the faith. It is moving to think how servants and slaves must have felt, hearing their lot and their labors proposed as the pattern of a sacred life, and as a force that could transform the world.

But before you dismiss this collection as just too fussy, too serious, and conclude that theology has no practical purpose in a world of apps, credit default swaps, and suicide bombers, you need to ask yourself why you loved her Pulitzer Prize-winning "Gilead" so much. What was the fuel that stoked that slow burning, deeply impassioned love song? Well, this is. This. All this talk about Christ, and charity, and being your brother's keeper, about rejoicing in creation, about reveling in the joy that arises from the knowledge that there is so much invisible life, so much that can never be known, and that life is given to us, in part, to search and never stop searching for those things that we cannot know with absolute certainty, not as long as we have breath in our bodies.

Ms. Robinson issues this appeal out of left field, drawing exclusively on a discrete, obscure, and too-readily-dismissed-in-our-age body of human thought - theology - and yet her appeal is far from impractical: it is made in the hope of addressing a world going/gone wrong, and a people losing heart. Certainly its frequent point of reference - ante-Nicene theology (100-325 A.D.), particularly that of St. John Chrysostom, as illuminated in and filtered through Calvin, Locke, William James, String Theory, and Noam Chomsky, among others - may have us rightly complaining that those writers, those subjects, are unfamiliar to us. But that is hardly to our credit, or to Marilynne's reproach.

Yes, this book will challenge you. Not least because Marilynne Robinson's theological writing has a delightful footloose quality to it. She can be tough to parse. Her method is to start off an essay with a serious intent to address Christology (the person & work of Christ) or Eschatology (the question of What's Coming Next?), but somewhere in the middle there she wanders over to her true forte - Soteriology (practical religion for folks looking for answers, or, ways of thinking about hard, ancient questions). And all the while, despite the complexity, despite the tangential quality, her goal is unapologetically anthropological. Her goal is You: your reassurance, your admonition, your restoration. And when, tell me, has that ever been simple, straightforward, or uncontentious?

And so these seventeen essays, theological treatises, and rambling meditations. As if you'd sat down for coffee and pie in the sunny kitchen of your favorite aunt - the one with the PhD and the chart-topping vocabulary - and asked her to tell you why the world is so. And she starts off by saying, "oh my, this could take a while." And then she talks to you about where we came from and where we're going, and about much of the stuff that usually happens in between. And in her talking she loses you once in a while, and seems to lose herself. But in the end, what grabs you is her grace, her patience, her sober consideration, free of desperation, free of fear.

Magno cum gaudio.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection's primary driving question is: what does it mean to be human? And I thought Robinson explored this question really beautifully without trying to nail down an answer to it.

These essays look at string theory and neuroscience (CBL, if you're reading this, you should definitely read the first essay--"Humanities"--if you haven't already. I have a pdf of it I can send you), Shakespeare and the Reformation (so, so fascinating), the church in America, higher education in America, the Incarnation, the Civil Rights Movement as the third Great Awakening, and many other Robinson-y things (like John Calvin. My alternate title for this collection is *For the Love of John Calvin*. I'm pretty sure he makes an appearance in every essay). I had a lot of favorite essays, and they worked together so elegantly, it's difficult to single out specific ones. That said, I found her defense of the liberal Christian tradition in the US particularly evocative. I wouldn't typically describe MR as forceful, but that essay certainly is. And her piece on the "Reformation" was astounding to me. Despite being so Protestantly educated, I found this essay fresh and maybe even inspiring. Respect to those Lollards.

She makes her most sustained arguments for a robust humanism across these essays through focusing on the implications of having a high Christology. I want to cite one of her dozens of beautiful sentences on this, but they're so much better in context, so I won't. If you're intrigued, just read one (or two or all) of the essays--"Metaphysics" is the lynchpin for the collection i/r/t the Christology piece, but I loved other essays more.

MR talks a good bit about how her experience of aging is shaping her intellectual life. Compared to the *Death of Adam*, which I don't remember all that well, I thought this collection was even more saturated with grace for her fellow humans and more adamantly concerned about the state of the world (especially the state of the church in the US, but also the government). (A few times, reading these essays felt like slipping back into *Gilead*, one of my favorite places to be. I increasingly think MR and Rev. Ames have much in common, and this intensifies when she talks about getting old.) In the last essay, she writes about wishing that she had developed a more capacious view of realism earlier in life--a realism that embraced the pervasive experiences of grace and transcendence alongside all of those things we expect to find in realism. She indicates she was able to incorporate this into her fiction more readily than in life, but then powerfully practices this realism through re-reading what we tend to think of when we think of American society and culture (which is usually pretty dire). It's a moving, perfect end to a collection I loved in many, many ways.

I was going to give this four stars because I found a couple of essays tedious or slow, but I think that the pieces I didn't track with as much were actually really important to the collection as a whole, and I'm glad I read them.

[Guy Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally getting to this this review. I will start by saying this is not an easy read. However, the juice within is definitely worth the squeeze. These essays were actually speeches given at various universities and gatherings over several years. They are a pretty good collection of essays chock full of thought and backed up with historical context. If I had one wish, and this would simply be for my own selfish needs, it would that it was a bit simpler in the use of vocabulary. My dictionary and Thesaurus were given quite a workout. I only have myself to blame for this need. It is the reason I give this 4 stars rather than 5. There were sections that were just above my understanding. With that said Marilynne Robinson made one comment that spoke to me and made me sit back and realize that this fact should not hinder my reading of the work.

In the essay “Decline” Robinson shares this thought in defense of the study in Humanities for a powerful democracy-

"A student of Greek or German begins to understand that languages both constrain and enable the thought of those who speak them. Touch a limit of your understanding and it falls away, to reveal mystery upon mystery."

Again, but now taken from – “Reformation”

"Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of thought."

There are many references to reformists, Wycliffe, Calvin and "Piers the Ploughman", "Examinations of Anne Askew" among a few woven within. Shakespeare and his use of servanthood in his writing. One point especially, she is not shy in her exclamation and reverence towards John Calvin throughout the essays. It is in these areas and others I seem to have missed the essential prerequisite reading but did the best I could. It was in moments such as this the reading became slow moving, but only due to my own lack of education on the references.

The essays are full of brilliant thoughts and she does quite a bit of meandering to arrive at her point of view, but she does it well. Some of the writing is direct and may be off putting if one is not open to different points of view.

"The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English speaking country who think they can make themselves understood by shouting."

Marilynne never shouts, but there is no mistaking her thoughts on subjects such as gun control, gay marriage, and other current hot button social (and dare I say political) topics. She calls herself a Liberal Christian. I find it interesting that the conservative Christians love her even though some of her thinking clearly is not aligned with mainstream Christian thought.

I did like several points she made in “Limitation” –

"Our sacred dignity and our extreme vulnerability are the bases of a profound ethical obligation to weigh our actions in the scales of grace, not our corrupted notions of justice and retribution."

Overall I really enjoyed these essays and found my mind expanded in the end. And that is the point isn’t it? Understanding of others points of view rather than shouting down contrary thought. I will have to read again and again for some of it to reach me. There are some writing that is just tough. This is one book that goes from within my understanding and above my understanding, but I thoroughly enjoyed the ride.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging, eloquently written collection of essays. When Robinson delves deeply into theology, as she does frequently in this book, you need a clear head.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Marilynne, your words are nourishing and reassuring, like hot soup for my brain and cocoa for my spirit. I sure do love ya.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a huge fan of Marilynne Robinson, but I have to admit that if this was the first book of hers I had tried to read, I may have quit. The first couple essays here were not dull or anything like that, but I did not find them too compelling either. She writes a lot about Shakespeare in the beginning which is interesting, but I wasn't into it yet. Thankfully, I kept going. This book turned out to be fantastic, as is expected with Robinson.

Throughout these essays a number of themes become apparent. She writes on Shakespeare and Calvin, as well as the Puritans. Along with that she engages science, tackling everything from reductionism to quantum physics. She consistently wrestles with what it means to be human. There is a wonder in her writing and it is clear this wonder is driven by where she finds wonder - in the writings of Calvin and other great theologians as well as in the findings of science. It is a wonder that emphasizes the mystery, the fact that no theology or science can ever fully explain what it is to be human (after all, that would be reductionism). The best theology and the best science open us up to more questions, more wonder.

Of course, Robinson is most known for her novels. Good novels flow from the human experience and to reduce that experience to mere mechanism, to say the brain is solely the synapses firing, is to eliminate the wonder of creativity, of characters who jump off the page and surprise us. Robinson's novels and her essays can move us to wonder as we find fascination in the experience of being human.

[Victoria Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored these essays slowly over an entire year. My copy is marked up with underlining and comments in the margins, and "Q" for "Quote" on many pages.

There is no other 21st century writer who traverses the territory over which I am so extremely fond: American congregational Protestantism, theology and culture, critique of scientific rationalism. Robinson is my 21st century Emerson, giving us cultural critique "passed through the fire of thought."

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been wracking my brain over what to say about this book, which I would give 8 stars, or 10 stars, or 27 stars to, if I could. I think it's a testament to what a powerful book this is that, for me, anyway, any words of praise I could toss in Ms. Robinson's direction seem superfluos at best. In recommendations to my friends, I've taken the tactic of just filling up my facebook feed with quotes from the various essays in this collection, or, in two cases, just mailing the book directly to the people I most wanted to talk about this with and pestering with follow up texts- have you read it yet? Have you yet? Ok, yet?

Which is unfair, because this is a *really* intense book to get through. There is nothing about it that is hard, exactly- Ms. Robinson is an expert at a concise, perfect sentence (with the tiniest sting of wryness to it), which makes her one of the most clear writers I've encountered. So it's not hard to get at her meaning. It's just that it is so dense- there is so much meaning to get at! I found myself having to pace myself because my brain would be too crowded with notions and I'd just lie on my couch, stunned into a kind of temporary incoherancy while my brain re-organized around what I'd just read. I'm generally a fast reader and it's not even a thick book, so it was novel and frustrating to make so little headway. But when it was done I was- well, exhausted. I was also eager to pick it up and read it again.

Should any of my friends forgive me my insistant pestering and read it anyway, here is what I'd like to talk about with them:

1) When I read this book (and in the context of having grown up in a rural norther-eastern town that was culturally- almost reflexively- Christian, in a family headed by parents who simaltaneously were extremely restless and critical of Christianity and recieved authority but who also hedged all their bets on the question of eternity so sent my brother and I to a pretty conservative, authoritarian Baptist church for five years) I had the sensation of walking into a familiar dream, but this time knowing what I was doing, and being able to pick up the artifacts and read all the books and sniff the paint and touch the soil and muck about and stay as long as I liked. I felt as if Ms. Robinson was articulating in extremely precise ways aspects of my faith that I'd sort of been fumbling towards understanding- things that on some deep level I assumed were true (and staked my faith on, in fact) but had never heard articulated, and so struggled to come to terms with myself. Her invocation of Jesus as deliberately taking sides with the poor, the downtrodden, the wronged against- this is something that I have felt to speak to something essential about my faith (and the nature of God) but which, when I look around me in organized religion, has been so glaringly lacking, that my whole life I've assumed I was crazy or making it up. (Not that I was making up aspects of God's nature- I've moved to a place where I just do privilege that essential intuition over religious teachings, even/especially those of my own religion- but I did feel that the teachings of my own religion *supported* this intuition. Now I feel vindicated in not thinking I was putting evidence where there was only hopefullness).

2) Over and over and over Ms. Robinson speaks to the essential mystery of being alive. Her essay Givenness in particular explores this- but central to her writing I think there is a deep, vast respect for wonder, and a recognition that wonder- like all human traits and experiences- can be nurtured or it can be squelched.

3) Ms. Robinson does an excellent job of pointing out how (precisely, because she is a precise thinker) modern Christianity has become in many ways an edifice that squelches wonder.

4) Ms. Robinson's square, solid connection with slavery as the original sin of our country (alongside the horrific treatment of and theft from Native Americans) to our current state of almost insane gun-loving paranoia is challenging to read, because she makes the solid connection with that to the clear call, to those of us who consider ourselves Christian, with doing whatever it takes to address this original sin. This is challenging because I agree with her entirely, and have zero idea where to start.

5) When I was younger, and somewhat fed up with the constant drum beat of sin, sin, sin coming from the church I attended, and then even more fed up with the sort of euphoria around select kinds of sin in the Bible club I attended, I decided that though I loved God with all my heart (the old catechesm) and sought to serve Him, I was done with this concept of sin, and in particular I rejected the concept of Hell. Hell, it seemed to me, was a very extremely permanently awful punishment for people who, in my perspective, were mostly trying to just figure it out for themselves and do the best they could do. A God who would be so petty to assign a million lifetimes of torment for one lifetime of not happening to make the best religious guess was not a God I was interested in worshipping, and I just kind of had already fallen in love with a God that seemed a lot more- vast and interesting and loving- than that.

As I've gotten older, not much of that has changed. I still worship a God that seems to me vast and mysterious and comprised of a love whose nature I barely can grasp the sliver of a fingernail of. If there is a Hell, I don't believe anyone will end up there for eternity (and frankly I think Hell is more of a metaphor for the state of estrangment and alienation we all experience- some of us periodically, some of us for stretches of our whole lives, it seems). But I have begun to see the sense of the concept of original sin, and fallenness, and redemption. This could be the voice of experience, or it could be the result of not being 16 and nearly immortal and also not having done much of anything to disappoint myself yet, or it could be that I've just led a life which, for all it's luck and joys has also just been spectacularly full of poor judgment, mishandled situations and hurt I've regret causing- whatever is the case, I recognize now in a way I didn't when I was sixteen that life is very hard, and we are faced with hard, awful choices, and most people are faced with much more awful choices than I'll ever have to face. And even so, the desire for redemption is keen, and the desire for an explanation, a name for this human condition of mucking up things- it's a real thing. Marilynne Robinson uses the lexicon of sin and redemption because it's the working model she has and she embraces it- and she uses it to speak to universal experiences. We suffer. We are broken. We are driven by God knows what to acts of destruction that are awful, abhorrent. We are driven by (I hope!) God knows what to acts of creation, of love. And we are called to be our most holy self in the times when we can turn from destruction to love, and that is not a platitude but a hard, terrible, vulnerable, wonderful thing to do.

6) Calvinism? What what? Again, referring to the Baptist Church of my youth (it wasn't a bad church! The people there were quite friendly to me, and the minister was a kind man! But the theology was just a little on the rigid side! And I was probably not the most receptive to a rigid theology), my entire take on Calvin was to totally reject him. Marilynne Robinson, on the other hand, holds him to be the most influential and important of theologians (she calls him her patron saint, which I am 90 per cent sure is an example of her sly wit), which forces me to reconsider everything I had assumed and thought about his theology. I'm not where she is at, but I do feel I have a lot more reading to do.

7) Can we talk about the notion that the act of translating the Bible from latin into the various spoken languages of Europe in order to make it accessible to the common people was in itself an act of radical love (for God, for the common people) and respect (for same) that also, for the men who did the translating, was a conscious act of deconstructing privilege? Because I'd never thought about that and that blows me away.

8) Etc.

I recommended this book to my more religiously inclined friends, and am eager to meet up (this weekend!) to discuss it with a friend I made years ago when we both were members of the same Unitarian Universalist Church (she has since returned to her Quaker roots, and I've moved on to high church Episcopal ) who began reading it around the same time I did. I also recommended it to a friend of mine who isn't of a particularly religious nature and who may take issue with some of the pointed criticism of neuroscientists (the one part of the book that lost me was this part- I felt she was referencing some argument or essay or something that I didn't know about at all) and their positivists assumptions about the workings of the world but who also is game for reading things that challenge her assumptions and who has dear loved ones who are very much taken with religious matters. I wouldn't recommend this to friends who are atheists (on the grounds that it just might feel altogether too bizarre, this earnestness it attempting to decipher the nature of someone they think is imaginary?) or for whom reading is essentially a matter of escapism, and I would be hesitant to recommend this to someone who feels passionate about gun ownership. Ms. Robinson does not endorse that position and her humor and sentences are most biting in that essay.

But probably basically even if you are in those categories you should read it, because, who knows? You might end up as enamoured as I am and we definitely could talk about it, even if you shouted at me!

[Lydia Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is full of wisdom and excellent commentary on everything from Shakespeare to Calvin to gender inclusion to the reformation to guns to what it means to be a Christian, right here and now. I found it less enjoyable than her novels to be sure,
but it is still well worth your time. Two favorite quotes:
“What we have expressed, compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part."
“If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on another, it is easy to forget there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism, exactly the same grounds, in fact. That is because we are human. We still have every potential for good as we ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect in one another. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and degradations for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.”

[Aeisele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man! She gets better with age. Probably the most theological of all her essay collections, and some of the most beautiful prose she's written. Amazing!

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't always agree with her theology, and even less with her politics, but reading essays by a woman as thoughtful and eloquent as Ms Robinson is always interesting and beneficial.

[Meghan Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, it took me four years to read all the essays in this book. In that short but also very long time, I've gone on my own little odyssey. And the world of 2015, when Robinson compiled the book, is hard to remember. So my ambivalence about this book is significant, but my deep reverence for the mind of Marilynne Robinson remains. In my mind, she is The Type of that person you disagree with at a fundamental level about so many things; but because the fruit of that person's life is so beautiful and challenging (in this case, her novels and her willingness to call out her own tribe), you must understand why and how you disagree as much as you do. I didn't think I was going to keep reading her essays, but the last in this collection "Realism," which I just read yesterday, was so powerfully prescient, I think I'll carry on.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, but I waffled constantly between 3 and 4.

Marilynne Robinson is one of the most thoughtful and eloquent Christians, lauded especially for her award-winning novels and high-brow essays. Christian hipsters and even non-Christians admire her, which makes me stubbornly want to resist her as overrated (as witnessed by the profuse and effusive praise in other reviews here), though talented (see Alan Jacob's incisive and spot-on critique of her in the HARPER'S article "The Watchman: What Became of Christian Intellectuals?").

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of Goodreads is that I am driven to read faster and this means that I don't pause and reflect on certain books as much as I should. This is one of them (hence, why the 4 and not 3/5), although at the same time, there is enough repetition that what is the main subject of one essay is nodded to in another. In "The Givenness of Things," Robinson's favourite topics are John Calvin and Calvinism (she writes as a lay theologian), William Shakespeare, the futility of scientism, capitalism and the right to bear arms.

My favourite essays by far are the tremendous "Reformation" and "Servanthood," in which Robinson corrects assumptions and caricatures of the early Reformers and Puritans of being anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic (she points out, for instance, that Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, wrote the landmark play "Abraham's Sacrifice, the first play written on the model of classical drama in a modern European language" (p. 60).

But there are also serious qualms I have with Robinson. She is an icon of mainline Protestantism but she rebukes the mainline for avoiding talk of "sin." Yet at the same time, she dismisses the moral convictions of conservative Christians (particularly around sexuality; she is proudly supportive of same-sex marriage). I found Robinson's tone a bit too smug and preening as she chided conservative Christians. Her main targets for criticism is the economic exploitation of the poor that pads the pockets of business tycoons and the rampant use and abuse of firearms. Here I agree with Robinson - as a Canadian I will never understand the American obsession with gun ownership and recent years have sadly seen a spate of shooting tragedies in the USA. I hope the gun culture in the US fades away. As for economics, I also agree with Robinson that there is much exploitation as we bow to the market and governments and businesses cut benefits and financial aid to employees and the marginalized but at the same time I think this is far more complicated than Robinson makes it seem. I think the modern state should provide services such as health care and financial assistance to seniors, but at the same time, one argument is that by cutting spending one will retain more income with which they can choose where to spend it (numerous studies shows the generosity of religious believers via their private donations). Lastly, one of the essays in this book (I believe it is "Value") was given as part of the 17th Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lectures and while Robinson begins and ends with Bonhoeffer, "Value" has remarkably little to actually do with Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

[Christen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. I was not ready to read this book. I borrowed it from the library, but this would be a book I would buy and reread slowly and write all over the margins.

It is a hard read because you need to know things because she doesn't explain and assumes you know. I know I faired better than most readers because I am well versed in Shakespeare, John Calvin, John Locke, the Bible and theology. I also know a good portion of everything she wrote about, but there was some stuff that went over my head because I didn't want to research right then and there. It is a book to be taken slowly and ponder.

It's good, just realize it is a book that you will chew and ponder and still not really sure what she is saying and that is the point. The essays are written in a way that you the reader can either agree or disagree is her own opinions while you decides your own. At times she becomes more of a professor instead of a writer and vice versa.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson remains America's most necessary cultural critic (probably because she understands that we are-- YES-- doing things well) and probably our greatest prose stylist. I liked this collection less than the others; the essays are political and thoughtful as always, but this time they are more explicitly theological. Which means me being lost a whole lot more. I get the idea, though. Robinson's notion of humanity rests on her notion of God. I find both of her notions much more interesting that than those espoused by her "enemies," of sorts, and if I am to "go Christian," know that it's because of this woman.

[Blair Hodges · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an extended discussion of Robinson's Christology laid out in a number of essays that not infrequently revisit the same themes. Even the repetitious essays, however, are punctuated by enough unique suggestions clothed in Robinson's arresting prose to make them worth reading. (For instance, she frequently criticizes scientism, and at one point makes a startling comment about the fact that nothing is as ancient but feels so new every time as the morning.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

By turns conversational and relentlessly dense.

These essays feel thick– not in their prose style (which is masterful), but the complexity of thought which gets buttered on without pause, layer by layer. You’ve got to concentrate hard.

This is part self-reflection, with Robinson dissecting her own Calvinism at age 70. It’s also razor-sharp analysis of the American ‘moment’ – polarised politics, cultural decline (or actually golden age? Marilynne ventures), unrefreshed democracy. I found it overwhelming, and immensely thought-provoking.

The parts that resonated most were Robinson’s deft critique of lazy scientific positivism. The most outlandish to me was her Christology, which takes an ambitiously expansive view of the Incarnation and leads to a radiantly high humanism.

The nicest thing about Marilynne’s worldview is that she lands as an optimist – a rigorous one – which is a pretty rare and wonderful thing.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, I didn't quite finish, because there was a much-the-sameness by the end, but this is an enormously helpful and clarifying book about the history of Protestantism, esp in the US. However, um, isn't it rather staggering that the worldview is so limited to, um, Protestantism, and the Judeo-Christian (and slightly-Islamic, she briefly nods) tradition, for that matter? "We in the West," she writes. "The great religions," she writes. Um, um, and um. Please, we're talking about an obscure tribe in a country the size the of Massachusetts that by a fluke of history managed to spew its tradition over half the world, it's true. And unfortunate, IMO. In terms of world history, ancientness, and population size, it seems to me that Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism (not necessarily in that order) have as good or a greater claim to being "great religions." And why dismiss pre-Christian paganism, or "paganism"--ie, the so-called traditional religions still extant around the world? I sense a lack of knowledge here, a bit of too much certainty.

I have no quarrel with her claim that modern science leaves a lot of room for the marvelous, and that the existence of self, soul, and possibly God or some manifestation of the numinous make as much sense as brane worlds, quantum entanglement and the rest. BUT, why WESTERN religion? That's about as arbitrary as mathematicians and physicists would say that three dimensions and gravity are. Also, while she argues that an anthropocentric universe ought to be contemplated (and Hawking for one, is okay with such an idea as one of the many possible HISTORIES of the universe), another is that we are simply living in a three-d brane that supports human life, where there may be many other branes, 3-d or not.

Meanwhile, she also argues that "neuroscience" is devaluing the self and the soul, which may be true, but without a specific target or essay or article or quote to attack--ie, an occasion or counterargument she wishes to address, her case for the soul, which overall I don't object to, feels kind of strawpersony, or rather her attack on neuroscience does.

So, what she takes as "given".... well, we always have to examine our assumptions, don't we. Still, well worth reading, at least in parts.

Oooh... forgot to mention that while she's going on about how physics has re-introduced the concept of the marvelousness of the universe, Genesis's insight pretty much begins and ends with let there be light. Hinduism and Buddhism on the other hand...

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book. It's quite deep and I had to re-read many sentences to make sure I got the meaning. Last year I read her short book Absence Of Mind. There's some of that anti-reductionism in this book, too, but there's so much more.

I remember more than 30 years ago I read a book by a layperson titled "A Guide For The Perplexed". The author was actually a famous economist named E.F. Schumacher. Marilynne's book reminds me of his book a little, because what I remember of his book was an excursion into ontology, which Ms. Robinson also explores. But she goes further than Schumacher in that she makes strong declarations of her Christian beliefs, and I don't remember him doing that. He did a good job of explaining the concept of "adequatio", which essentially means the best way to know something deep and substantial is to bring yourself to the level where you can know it.

She comments on the current political environment, especially in relation to how Christianity is used for identity politics and how it is being twisted. What really scared me is that she wrote this *before* the advent of D.J. Trump. She's worried that we are missing the critical point where we need to stand up and speak out about the dangerous political and social environment. This makes me think of reading Martin Gardner describing the famous demagogues in our recent past (such as Father Coughlin).

Another book she slightly recalled for me was Erwin Chargaff's memoir "Heraclitean Fire". He was an eminent scientist but very critical of how science was conducted and its dangerous trends. It was not so much an anti-reductionist argument--he just highlighted how science is a human--all too human--enterprise. Thankfully, Ms. Robinson is not as acerbic and sardonic as Chargaff, but she does have touches of sly humor sneaked in. Also in relation to the dangerous political climate, Chargaff mentioned the widely read social critic (no such thing nowadays) Karl Kraus dismissing the rising Hitler as a non-entity. If we do the same kind of thing today we have learned nothing.

I like her explorations of Christianity through deep analyses of what it means to act as a Christian and the implications of demarcating between Christians and non-Christians. If Jesus was fully human and illustrated the apotheosis of our our finest qualities, then that gives us more hope than elevating him as a purely transcendent entity. It's hard to relate to that!

[Kathryn Bashaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost every essay in this book was so dense with interesting thinking that I ended up reading most of them twice. I love Robinson because her spiritual perspective is so much like my own. To read a book of essays by a very erudite progressive Christian was like a drink of sweet water. As she also says in one of her essays, I feel like Christianity has been hijacked in the US by fundamentalists and the radical political right, who are obsessed with the sexual behavior of other people, about which Christ said very little, and who mostly ignore the poor and the stranger, about whom Christ had a great deal to say. But I hasten to say that this is not a political book. It is really about metaphysics. Who are we as human beings? What is the purpose of the universe? Is our universe even the only one? Robinson comes at these questions from a Christian (specifically, Calvinist) perspective, but also from a scholarly one. I love her passionate defense of the arts and humanities, and of human thought itself. She has re-enchanted humanity and the world we live in with this serious and lovely collection of thoughts.
So why only 4 stars then? Because Robinson is so erudite, and these essays are so dense, that they were a little hard to read (another reason why I had to read them twice). She wanders off a bit at times, and some of her sentences are so labyrinthine that when you finally come to the end you have to go back to the start of the sentence to remember where she started. Metaphysics is hard stuff. When you're writing about hard stuff for a general audience, it is important to be very clear and as concise as possible. I think Robinson indulged herself a little too much, and I think her editor was too indulgent, too. I still loved the book; I just wish it were an easier read so it would get a larger audience.
Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm technically cheating on this one, since the book had to be returned to the library when I still had one essay to go. On the other hand, the fact that I—no quitter when it comes to books I'm struggling with—felt no compunction about dropping it in the return slot should say something about how unremittingly turgid Marilynne Robinson's nonfiction writing has become. With the exception of one excellent essay about Shakespeare and (what else) Calvinism, Robinson fails to instill in the reader the same enthusiasm she feels for her pet topics. Add in a copious dusting of sanctimoniousness (a new and unfortunate development in her nonfiction voice), and some essays become almost unreadable: word-dense sludge that offers no ultimate reward to those who are hearty enough to persevere.

Marilynne Robinson was once a welcome oasis in the desert of left-leaning American intelligentsia: a rigorous, steady thinker whose Christianity infused her writing with warmth, humility, and the numinous. Oh well; I guess we all get grouchy in our old age.

[David Goetz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deeply disappointing, especially given my long affection for her earlier work. There are some good bits about Shakespeare in here, a few nice turns of phrase ("the inexhaustible ordinary," "hermeneutics of snobbery," "a recent vogue for feeling culturally embattled"), and an occasional theologically-rich statement ("The Incarnation is ... the great fact that gives every act and saying of Jesus the character of revelation"); but on the whole these essays are just blah. Robinson is too casual (e.g., making references without citations), too quasi-philosophical, and annoying in her insistence on quoting Calvin repeatedly while simultaneously rejecting most of the basic convictions that animated his writing.

[Lesley]

I'm not sure how to grade in star terms a book by a writer I much admire, some of which really spoke to me, and some of which was going into realms of thought with which I'm not familiar (one of the reasons why I bogged down in this for so long). Experience a bit like that with a book I read for review last year which was not in my own field, though somewhat adjacent, and was clearly engaging with various intradisciplinary debates about which I knew nothing and had difficulty getting a handle on, and found it a major effort to get through.
This was beautifully written (the other work I mentioned, not so much).