Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
Featured Book
A passionate, personal inquiry into one's beliefs
Over the past decade, Marilynne Robinson has emerged as one of our most linguistically gifted writers and most interesting thinkers. She has given us the novels Gilead and Home, and she has amplified them with essays and lectures that have revealed her full range as a writer and a thinker. When I Was a Child I Read Books comes to us as Robinson’s widest-ranging collection of nonfiction yet. Here she looks into the global debt crisis, politics, God, her childhood, the morality at the heart of Christianity, while drawing on Thomas Aquinas, the Bible, Jonathan Edwards and Walt Whitman, among numerous others. These diverse subjects are all toward Robinson’s continuing look into theology – a longtime concern of hers – and toward giving us an honest, but not tell-all, sense of herself. What comes across most clearly here is Robinson’s idea of a Christianity that is a valid, deeply felt alternative to the brand of American Christianity that is found readily on TV and in newspapers. Unlike the latter kind, Robinson’s religion is not adverse to science: “Subscribe to Scientific American for a year,” she says, to see just how great God is. Nor is it close-minded: Robinson extols the Ten Commandments but sees them as agents of compassion and generosity, not tools with which to deny rights and demonize others. Ultimately, Robinson calls her book “an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins.” Her struggle to escape her prejudices informs ours as well. We are fortunate to have such a fine thinker sharing thoughts on subjects that are affecting us most deeply right now.
