Editorial Content for The Givenness of Things: Essays

The New York Review of Books recently published parts one and two of an extended conversation in September 2015 in Iowa between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for GILEAD. Readers of that fascinating exchange whose familiarity with Robinson doesn't extend beyond a relatively small body of fiction --- which includes that novel and others like HOME and LILA --- learned that she's a close observer of America's culture and politics and someone whose life and writing are informed by a deep engagement with Christianity.

Those aspects of Robinson's thinking are explored in the 17 essays that compose THE GIVENNESS OF THINGS. This searching, at times daunting, collection exposes a great and restless mind grappling mightily (but with humility) with some of the most challenging aspects of human existence.

In its best moments, Robinson's book offers a passionate defense of her liberal Christian, humanistic worldview against both scientific materialism and capitalism's worship of the market. As to the former, Robinson is especially dismissive of the increasing dominance of neuroscience for the way it "greatly overreaches the implications of its evidence and is tendentious" (a favorite Robinson adjective). At the same time, she's no science denier. On the contrary, she's eager to give the theories of modern physics and cosmology their due in an effort to describe (if not explain) a complicated universe.

"THE GIVENNESS OF THINGS provides stimulating insight into the persistent themes of [Robinson's] fiction and shines a light on what it means to her to be a devout Christian in the modern world."

A "self-declared Calvinist from northern Idaho," Robinson leaves no doubt of her place on the political spectrum. In the essay "Awakening" (like all but one of the pieces, its one-word title is not especially informative of its content), she decries the brand of Christianity that "has brought a harshness, a bitterness, a crudeness and a high-handedness into the public sphere that are only to be compared to the politics, or the collapse of politics, in the period before the Civil War." She offers a withering condemnation of the way that opposition to gun control or support for privatizing prisons have somehow been defined as "Christian" points of view:

"I never feel more Christian," she writes, "than I do when I hear of some new scheme for depriving and humiliating the poor, and feel the shock of religious dread at these blatant contraventions of what I, as a Christian, take to be the will of God. And yes, I can quote chapter and verse."

That disdain is matched only by her critique of an economic system that disparages the liberal arts in service of the single-minded goal of "making our children into maximally efficient workers." Instead, she argues, with no little vehemence, that "If we are to be competent citizens of a powerful democracy, we must encourage the study of the aptly named humanities."

Especially noteworthy in the current climate of free-floating dread engendered by events like the attacks in Paris is Robinson's resounding condemnation, in the appropriately titled essay "Fear," of the "marked and oddly general fearfulness of our culture at present," something she describes as "not a Christian habit of mind." With persistent rumors of terrorist plots and enhanced security measures at public gatherings, it's easy enough to identify with what she calls the "so entrenched habit with us to live in a state of alarmed anticipation, gearing up for things that do not happen."

This collection is less political, less personal and, regrettably, frequently less accessible than Robinson's 2012 book of essays, WHEN I WAS A CHILD I READ BOOKS. As she reveals in her Acknowledgements, these pieces originally were delivered as lectures at institutions that included the First Presbyterian Church of New York City and the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. That provenance perhaps explains the opacity of essays that focus on the identity of Jesus ("Son of Adam, Son of Man") or the Gospel of Mark ("Limitation"), and whose arguments will prove elusive, if not impenetrable, to readers not already steeped in Christian theology or without a deep interest in the topic.

But Robinson, who wrote her doctoral thesis on Shakespeare, can be a delightful and informative historian and critic when dealing with challenging literary material. In the essay "Grace," she explores that concept in the dramas of “Hamlet” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” noting along the way that "the Puritans were not puritanical. Nor were they anti-intellectual or obscurantist." "Servanthood" reveals the somewhat surprising interplay between theology and art in Shakespeare's time, noting that "much of the literature and poetry of the English Renaissance was the work of people who were Puritans and Calvinists."

Among contemporary authors who have achieved significant levels of both commercial success and critical recognition, Marilynne Robinson stands alone in her unabashed religiosity and the depth of her scholarly engagement. THE GIVENNESS OF THINGS provides stimulating insight into the persistent themes of her fiction and shines a light on what it means to her to be a devout Christian in the modern world.