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Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary posits that Robinson's widely celebrated novels and essays are best understood as emerging from a foundational theology that has 'the Ordinary' as its source. Reading Robinson's published work, and drawing on an original interview with Robinson, Andrew Cunning constructs an authentically Robinsonian theology that is at once distinctly American and conversant with contemporary continental philosophy of religion. This book demonstrates that the Ordinary is the source of Robinson's writing and, as a phenomenon that opens onto a surplus of meaning, is where Robinson's notion of transcendence emerges. Robinson's theology is one centered on the material reality of the world and on the subjective nature of one's encounter with oneself and the physical stuff of existence. Arguing that the Ordinary demands an artistic response, this book reads Robinson's fiction as her theological response to the surplus of meaning in ordinary experience. Under the themes of grace, language, time and self, Cunning locates the ordinary, everyday grounding of Robinson's metaphysics.
"This book outlines the foundational theology of Marilynne Robinson's work through sustained analysis of her novels, essays, unpublished notebooks, drafts, and an original interview with the author"--
"The story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience."--
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today, and her writing offers probing meditations on the Christian faith. Based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson's work—and with the author herself.
Though his influence on American society has often been forgotten or misunderstood, John Calvin played a formative role in the traditions of almost every sector of American life. This wide-ranging study, comprising twelve essays, shows for the first time the extraordinary extent to which Calvinist thoughts and practices are woven into the fabric of American society, theology, and letters, from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. John Calvin's American Legacy examines the economics of the Colonial period, Calvin's effect on American identity, and the evidence for Calvin's influence on American democracy. The book next addresses Calvin's critical role in American theology, inspecting the relationship between Jonathan Edwards's and Calvin's church practices, the diverse views on the Calvinist theological tradition in the nineteenth century, the ways in which Calvin was understood in the historiography of Williston Walker and Perry Miller, and Calvin's influence on twentieth-century theologies. Finally, the book explores Calvinism's influence on American literature, examining the work of such writers as Samson Occom, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Max Weber, Mark Twain, John Updike, and Marilynne Robinson. This important book is the first to introduces readers to the breadth and depth of Calvin's influence along the spectrum of American thought and society, from the 18th century to modern times.
The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations. Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.
A comprehensive study of the award-winning Midwestern author of fiction and nonfiction Alex Engebretson offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Understanding Marilynne Robinson examines this author of three highly acclaimed novels and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Orange Prize for fiction, and the National Humanities Medal. Through close readings of the novels and essay collections, Engebretson uncovers the unifying elements of Robinson's work: a dialogue with liberal Protestantism, an emphasis on regional settings, the marked influence of nineteenth-century American literature, and the theme of home. The study begins with Housekeeping, Robinson's haunting debut novel, which undertakes a feminist revision of the Western genre. Twenty-four years later Robinson began a literary project that would bring her national recognition, three novels set in a small, rural Iowa town. The first was Gilead, which took up the major American themes of race, the legacy of the Civil War, and the tensions between secular and religious lives. Two more Gilead novels followed, Home and Lila, both of which display Robinson's gift for capturing the mysterious dynamics of sin and grace. In Understanding Marilynne Robinson, Engebretson also reviews her substantial body of non-fiction, which demonstrates a dazzling intellectual range, from the contemporary science-religion debates, to Shakespeare, to the fate of liberal democracy. Throughout this study Engebretson makes the argument for Marilynne Robinson as an essential, deeply unfashionable, visionary presence within today's literary scene.
From the author of the magnificent, award-winning novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA comes this wonderful, heart-warming collection of essays about reading. 'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama Marilynne Robinson is not only a writer of sharp, subtly moving fiction, but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this luminous collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her bestselling novels: the place literature has in life, the role of faith in modern living, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our best-loved writers.
'[Her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama 'Marilynne Robinson is one of the greatest writers of our time' Sunday Times 'Jack is the fourth in Robinson's luminous, profound Gilead series and perhaps the best yet' Observer Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American National Humanities Medal, returns to the world of Gilead with Jack, the final in one of the great works of contemporary American fiction. Jack tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the loved and grieved-over prodigal son of a Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, a drunkard and a ne'er-do-well. In segregated St. Louis sometime after World War II, Jack falls in love with Della Miles, an African-American high school teacher, also a preacher's child, with a discriminating mind, a generous spirit and an independent will. Their fraught, beautiful story is one of Robinson's greatest achievements.
"Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." —David Brooks, New York Times How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America’s culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we’re doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren’t thinking. Most of us don’t want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It’s impossible to “think for yourself.”) Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.