Marilynne Robinson

Renée van Riessen besprak in haar afscheidslezing vier vensters op nabijheid en dat levert talloze waardevolle inzichten op. In zijn reactie op deze lezing doet Rik Peels een poging tot een christelijke inbedding van nabijheid. Hij stelt daarbij vragen als: wie dien ik nabij te zijn? Zijn er grenzen aan nabijheid? Is er hoop als je geen nabijheid vindt in deze wereld?

Surveys the major debates and contributions of the first ten years of scholarly literature on Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Comes with several appendices, including a short alphabetical bibliography, an annotated chronological bibliography, and a statistical breakdown of publications per year illustrated by tables and graphs.

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

My review of the third book in Marilynne Robinson's great trilogy about those close to Reverend Ames in the small Iowan town of Gilead.

Lila is Reverend Ames' young wife and mother of his son, Robbie.  Lila provides yet another perspective on life in that town.

Lila has seen struggle and lived a life where Ames' great religious questions meant little. She seeks to resolve the lessons her life taught her with the beliefs of the husband she loves.

Of all the parables in the New Testament, the tale of the prodigal son is one of the most important and popular as it presents with the clarity of fiction the intimate relationship between God and man; chronicling sin, conversion, mercy, and redemption.  A central feature of the story is the description of God as a loving father, who meets his repentant son halfway on the road.
In the following, I will look into two modern retellings of this parable, namely the novel Home by Marilynne Robinson (2008) and Michael D. O’Brien’s The Father’s Tale (2011). In both of these novels, the focus is on the father, and then not a father overflowing with mercy, but a man troubled and afflicted with his ideal of fatherhood. Thus, it is the redemption of the father that is in focus, not primarily the son.
The character arc of the father provides the “spine” of the story, while it is not important or peripheral to the main storyline, when or whether the son goes through a true metanoia. My comparison will be between these two fictive fathers and what understandings they imply of the human-divine relationship.
The thesis of my essay is that although both authors seem to have exchanged the divine father for a very human one, these figures of earthly fatherhood, as the biblical parable, still speaks in a figurative way about our understanding of divine fatherhood.

This paper aims to show that fictional narratives, as integrated products of the author’s imagination and reason, can serve theological dialogues as new ways to present religious ideas and lives. This is possible because they show religious truth immersed in everyday life rather than try to explain it in the language of doctrines and propositions. This paper particularly focuses on the characters in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home, which center around the implied question, “Can a person change?” In fact, a simple answer is given through a character. However, I argue that this question can be explored and possibly answered through other important questions suggested in the novels, including “What is a soul?” and “What does it mean to come home?” These play a crucial role in not only answering the question but also developing the characters and the plot. They also bring out important discussions on the concept of an individual soul, human depravity, the reality of father’s love encompassing both joy and sorrow. Lastly, I discuss how faith and hope are intricately linked to a possibility of forgiveness in relationships and demonstrate how this is shown through subtle changes of two characters in the two novels.

This article examines creation as a central theme in the fiction of Marilynne Robinson. First it will look at the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo as a major theme of Gilead. This will be read against the Genesis narrative of creation and the doctrine of the fall as expressed in Robinson's next novel, Housekeeping. The theme becomes less apparent in her third novel, Home, which further illuminates the theme in the previous ones. An understanding of this doctrinal and narrative background provides insight into both novels and their main characters and reveals Robinson as an important theological voice qua novelist.

At the heart of Marilynne Robinson's little masterpiece 'Housekeeping' are twinned enigmas. The first concerns two girls: not our narrator Ruthie or her sister Lucille, but rather their mother, Helen Stone, and her sister, the girls' distrait and transient aunt, Mrs Sylvia Fisher. The second enigma is a material matter, without any of the psychological difficulties of the first: What happened to derail the passenger train crossing the bridge in Fingerbone, on board which the girls' father was working? The enigmas are twinned not only because the girls' troubles are connected to the loss of their father. Their true connection is that they have the same solution: the train was derailed by the effect of evasive action taken by the driver to avoid two young girls - Helen and Sylvie - out crossing the bridge at night. Though this is nowhere stated explicitly in the novel, it is clear enough, and is the reason the event casts an inescapable shadow over the lives not only of Helen and Sylvie, but of Ruth, whom Sylvie has told of the matter.

American Puritanism has been marked by the rhetorical tradition of the jeremiad, which were fiery sermons used as a rebuke against moral decline and as a call for repentance and reformation. Marilynne Robinson’s effort to rescue Puritanism reworks the traditional jeremiad and moves towards a more inclusive theology and political ideology. She offers a version of Puritanism that is more compatible with 21st century mores but one that obscures some of the fundamental teachings and problems associated with that tradition.

Marilynne Robinson’s novels "Home" and "Gilead" offer a compelling ethical framework for contemporary readers. After reviewing the shift in how her seminal novel "Housekeeping "has been received, this article demonstrates how Robinson’s more recent fiction focuses on responsibility, generosity, and interdependence, all founded in a system of belief her protagonists have accepted. Robinson’s work invites readers to reconsider humanistic concerns in ways that speak back to neoliberal hegemony and postmodern relativism.

Marilynne Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the Civil Rights Era even as she relegates black history and black voices to her novels' peripheries. Blackness nonetheless lurks and frays at the edges of both narratives, at the edges of memory, remaining simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in both John Ames's and Glory Boughton's remembering of the past. In this essay, I use Robinson's companion novels to illuminate the ways in which American society's representation of black bodies and subjectivities makes possible ways of remembering and retelling Blackness that affirm kinship between white fathers and sons and make lineage transpire between them. Robinson is not blameless of this representational strategy. She is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; she does not address, however, how she also utilizes that absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son.

The American author Marilynne Robinson is, in her five novels as much as in her half a dozen collection of essays, not only an accomplished novelist but also a theologian. With a rare depth, she energetically treats central theological, ethical, and philosophical questions, in sharp and challenging essays and in aesthetically advanced and kaleidoscopic novels. The essays in the present volume study, from various perspectives, the intersection between theology and the entire corpus (except for the most recent novel published in 2020) of Robinson's writings. The first section, "On Theology", analyzes her theology from the more general perspectives of poetics, science, and history, whereas the second, "On the Novels", collects contributions that have one of Robinson's three novels Gilead, Home, or Lila as their particular focus. Common to all these essays is the attempt to understand why and how Robinson is one of our age's most celebrated authors on home and homelessness, and on faith, grace and hope in the midst of despair.

This article explores Marilynne Robinson's use of space in her 2014 novel Lila to illustrate a dynamic relationship between the religious and the secular. The titular character's movement among a variety of physical spaces raises questions about the possibility of "dwelling" in the sense of belonging to a place or community. Characters' earthly situatedness points to larger questions of spiritual situatedness and identity. Robinson's novel is posited as a valuable point of reference for postsecular studies, a critical perspective through which the role of the religious in literary studies is being redefined.

In this essay, I explore the theme of suffering in the Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead (2004). Reverend John Ames, the story’s protagonist, encounters deep suffering throughout his life, from the death of his wife and daughter as a young man to his impending death as an old man, which forces him to leave behind his new wife and young son. In his letter to his son, which is the text of Gilead, Ames meditates on the meaning of suffering from the perspective of Christian faith, hope, and love. What gradually unfolds in his reflections is the realization that even in times of profound suffering grace appears in moments of beauty that signal God’s ability to transform suffering. In my analysis, I will expound on the theological significance of Gilead as a literary foray into the question of suffering in human experience.

This paper examines Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as the author’s acknowledgement of the divisions that threaten to breakdown human relationships and her offer of grace as the adhesive that binds people in spite of these natural schisms.  Unlike many contemporary Christian leaders, Robinson in this story offers no dictates for how Christians should vote.  Rather, her novel allows space and encourages room for the conversation to expand.  All told, her work attacks the myopia and divisiveness that currently animates politics and its supporting media structure.  And, ultimately, that project—to broaden public discourse, to reframe political concerns within an examination of the human condition—seems to be at the heart of her body of literature and specifically in this novel.  As such, reading Gilead can offer guidelines, rather than dictates, for Christians’ involvement in the political realm.  And this paper examines Robinson’s understanding of the function of grace specifically in engaging in political discourse.

This paper examines the process of a character's change in the fourth novel by Marilynne Robinson. As the main character Lila experiences loneliness, destitution and abandonment, she asks an existential question, "Why do things happen the way they do?", which is charged with theological meanings. In an attempt to understand the existential condition in which a person raises such a question, I explore the tradition of Christian mystics whose longing for God and prayer lives fully embraced paradoxical concepts such as "unknowing as knowing" and "presence in absence", and draw a parallel with Lila's experience. Also, borrowing John Calvin's idea of human perception as "the theatre of God", I look into how a subtle and gradual change in Lila's perception comes about through her memories, her unmediated Bible reading, her relationship with Reverend Ames and, most importantly, her encounter with a stranger. Unlike some critics suggest, I offer a profoundly hopeful reading in her transformation.

In Gilead and Home, Robinson redeploys the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) through the troubled life of Jack Boughton. Robinson’s American retelling of the classic parable, however, does not simply transpose the story from first-century Palestine to twentieth-century Iowa. Instead, she refracts it through the soteriological prism of Calvinism, particularly the doctrine of double-predestination, and situates it within an American historical and existential context. In my chapter, I argue that Jack Boughton’s spiritual turmoil personalizes an abstract theological doctrine, giving it a “face” for the reader to reflect on the mystery of salvation. Jack’s quest for spiritual direction and his fractured relationships with his family, friends, and himself function as a literary meditation on the reach of divine grace, which simultaneously reinscribes and problematizes Robinson’s Calvinism. Jack is a mystery to himself and others, and his inability to find peace suggests his damnation, at least in his own theological estimation, even as his love for his wife and son and his family’s love for him hold out hope for his ultimate redemption. Mystery, then, tempers the cold edge of the doctrine of double-predestination in the novels.

My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in Jean Cauvin, the sixteenth-century French humanist and theologian-he died in 1564, the year Shakespeare was born-known to us by the name John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt the average reader would have read this far.

Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping is the narrative of a family defined by traumatic loss. In a functioning of post-memory, the death of the patriarch ripples through three generations onto the protagonist Ruth, who by the end of the novel deals with her trauma by becoming a wanderer. I contend that this ending, and the interim process of Ruth’s spiritual growth, shows how there is a psychological and spiritual benefit to addressing traumatic loss not as something to bear and cope with but as a source of new meaning in life. Drawing on contemporary trauma theorists, I interpret the novel, especially in its lyrical extended metaphors, as demonstrating the ethical obligation to transform traumatic repetition into narrative catharsis. Ultimately, my reading of the novel concludes that incorporating traumatic loss into one’s life and even celebrating it as a source of spiritual growth can lead to a more complete human experience.

Taking the Ignatian principle of indifference as a point of departure, and
engaging recent scholarship that contests any essential basis for a wider concept of “Nature” (e.g., Timothy Morton’s “Ecology without Nature”), this essay will consider Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping and poems by GerardManley Hopkins as texts from which we might derive a response to the notion of a universe devoid of concern for human flourishing.

In this essay, I consider the act of losing and abandoning homes that occurs in both john Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1982).  I argue that both novels narrate an act of “unhoming”, a term coined by theorist Homi Baba, which is a transition from a stable, patriarchal, house to a transient and fluid family.  Drawing on the theories of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, I show how in these novels the home is conceptualized as a patriarchal structure in which hierarchies are established and roles are performed.  I contend that Steinbeck and Robinson depict this understanding of home in the beginnings of their novels, and then spend the rest of their books working to undermine and destabilize this structure.  In both novels, the destabilization of the home-structure occurs initially as a result of natural forces—the dust storms in Steinbeck and annual flooding in Robinson—and secondarily as one of social forces.  This essay traces these destabilizations and discusses the other possible understandings outside of the traditional definition of family that the characters explore.  The enigma with which both novels contend is what a family becomes when it can no longer rely upon a stable patriarchal structure.  I argue that in both novels, the transient family may not have the traditional trappings of a stable unit, but it is still worthy of being considered a family.

This chapter investigates how various genres of first person narrative interact within the discourse of epistolarity in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, dealing with an old dying father and clergyman writing to his very young son. The analysis exposes how this interaction is governed by the narrator’s ambition to unselfishly guide and help his son – in vain trying to forget his own personal failures, desires, dilemmas and feelings of guilt. Most interesting is how the formal-rhetorical swaying of the text activates and illustrates deep theological issues of love, sin, guilt and forgiveness.

„Napjaink egyik legizgalmasabb és legfontosabb teológiai gondolkodója egy regényíró, aki közel hozza hozzánk a Himalájából alászállt Kálvint.” - Marilynne Robinson: A gondolkodás szabadsága – Kálvinista tűnődések, Kálvin Kiadó, Budapest, 2018.

Reverend Ames writes a testament to his young son intended to be read when the son is old and the father is dead.
He contemplates his immediate family and the lives of his father and grandfather before him.
He chides himself for being unable to live up to the expectations of his faith but, in doing so, he contemplates the grand questions.
The answers he find surprise him as well as the reader.

Parenting and teaching are relational acts; the relationship between a parent and child, a teacher and student—this is fertile ground, and some of our most meaningful and foundational experiences stem from these connections (van Manen, 2016). This paper aims to examine one such experience through a methodological lens that puts curriculum theory into conversation with the phenomenological (Rafferty, 2011): specifically, the lived-experience of children leaving, of the endings that are inevitably bound up with the practices of parenting and teaching. Reflecting upon our experiences as children and students might enrich our present-day practice as parents and teachers (Dewey, 1938/1997; Pinar, 1975); stemming from this, a phenomenological interview I conducted with my mother guides this paper, and my own experiences as a child and student are also brought to bear. This paper concludes with suggestions that diverge in two directions: (1) what an attunement to the phenomenon of children leaving might offer our practice as teachers, and (2) how this type of reflective and intentional self-analysis—a sort of qualitative research that is reflexive and open—might allow our work as parents and teachers to flourish in new and previously undisclosed ways.

The total naturalization of feelings reduces the phenomena and thereby misses an essential feature of feelings. One paramount ingredient that is missing in a radically naturalized description of feelings, which has daunting ethical implications, is the experience of unmerited seriousness innate in the fully-fledged phenomena of feelings. Without a language for such unmerited seriousness, no language for ethics. In the end, a strict naturalistic approach to human emotion cannot take the experience of seriousness seriously, it cannot perceive moral values with the kind of gravity morality demands. Only the phenomenology can claim the legitimacy of that which the naturalists must ultimately hold to be at best a convenient convention, or worse an ill-informed illusion.

The Story upon a Hill: The Puritan Myth in Contemporary American Fiction analyzes the work of several of the most important contemporary writers in the United States as reinterpreting commonplace narratives of the country’s origins with a keen eye on the effects of inclusion and exclusion that Puritan myths promote. In 1989, Ronald Reagan recalled the words of Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, who imagined the colony as a “city upon a hill” for future nations to emulate. In Reagan’s speech, Winthrop’s signature rhetoric became an emblem of American idealism, and for many Americans, the Puritans’ New England was the place where the United States forged its original identity.

This paper argues that there is a formal similarity between what the best fiction authors do and what what phenomenologists call the reduction, which is the process of being " led back " (reduco) from an unreflective engagement with the world to a reflective one. Flannery O'Connor and Marilynne Robinson are two authors who attempt to wake us from our complacency to the fuller reality that surrounds us. In doing so, they furnish two examples of what we might call an " artistic reduction. " Reading them in this way helps us see in the midst of its literary presentation, the theological significance of their works. Thus, not only do these authors engage in the reduction and provide the opportunity for their readers to do so as well, we too as readers engage in a reduction whereby the necessarily rich, varied, and fictional life-worlds of Robinson and O'Connor can furnish us principles for our philosophical and theological reflection.

This article explores method acting as a metaphor for literary experience. Through a close reading of George Saunders's 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo (along with several other texts, including Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Marilynne Robinson's Home), I argue explore the implications of this metaphor, and position it as a particularly generative account of reading. My argument intervenes in numerous recent debates within literary criticism, including those around surface reading, postcritique, affect studies, and literary ethics.