What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

Overview

New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake American political and cultural life as “deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374282219
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	551,537
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Lila, Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping, and the nonfiction books The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She lives in Iowa.

Hometown:

Iowa City, Iowa

Date of Birth:

November 26, 1943

Place of Birth:

Sandpoint, Idaho

Education:

B.A., Brown University, 1966

Table of Contents

Preface
* What Is Freedom of Conscience?
* What Are We Doing Here?
* Theology for this Moment
* The Sacred, the Human
* The Divine
* The American Scholar Now
* Grace and Beauty
* A Proof, a Test, an Instruction
* The Beautiful Changes
* Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself
* Mind, Conscience, Soul
* Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love
* Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition
* Old Souls, New World
* Slander

Editorial Reviews

Like [Melville and Dickinson and the other Transcendentalists], [Robinson] is an ardent armchair naturalist, not to mention an ardent armchair theologian, cosmologist, ethicist, historian. Like them, she sees, or creates through metaphor, correspondences across disparate fields, frames of reference, states of being—between cosmos and mind, or astronomy and history, black holes and the absences in stories…She has become a kind of prophet and exegete of American democracy, as devoted to our secular scriptures as to her Christian ones. Her essays self-consciously recall the reformers of the 19th century, those Ciceros of the lyceum and the revival tent…At a time when academia can resemble an archipelago, the disciplines more specialized than finch beaks in the Galápagos, Robinson's audaciously heterodox thinking can exhilarate. She makes one wish that more literary scholars read up on dark matter, and that more professors in the STEM fields appreciated the difference between a mass spectrometer and a metaphor, the poetic logic of Genesis and a data set.

The New York Times Book Review - Donovan Hohn

11/13/2017
This collection of 15 essays by Pulitzer-winning author Robinson (The Givenness of Things) is sometimes cranky and rambling, but always passionate. Robinson’s crankiness comes out in her love of Puritans, Calvinists, and Oliver Cromwell, and her annoyance at history’s maligning of them. Yet it also stems from her passion for art and beauty, a humane deity, and a world run more by moral compass than balance sheet. Following Robinson’s train of thought can make for a bumpy and circuitous ride, no doubt in part because most of the essays originated as spoken addresses. Yet with Robinson as guide, details in the cultural terrain emerge that one might otherwise miss. She points out in “The American Scholar Now” that when the U.S. actively funded the humanities, its prosperity simultaneously grew. Elsewhere in the same piece, she notes that “the Citizen has become the Taxpayer” as civic ideals have eroded. In “Slander” she looks with approval at the long Christian tradition of curbing one’s tongue and unequivocally places blame for a now uncivil society on an unhappy convergence of “dystopian media” with right-wing Christianity. An essay or two rambles too much—“Untitled” is aptly named—but Robinson’s overall trajectory is clear and important. Her eloquent work stands up for a compassionate faith, the value of education, and a sense of decency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] collection of learned, probing essays...Robinson’s gorgeous, demanding, and enlightening essays, propelled by her intricate vision of unity, radiantly recharge both mind and soul.” —Booklist

"A dense, eccentric book of profound and generous gifts." —Parul Seghal, The New York Times Book Review

“[Robinson’s] eloquent work stands up for a compassionate faith, the value of education, and a sense of decency.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] trenchant [collection of] essays about faith, values, and history...Sharp, elegant cultural analysis.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

09/15/2017
Addressing our current political climate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Robinson, not unexpectedly, does so by considering how writers such as Emerson and Tocqueville have shaped our political thought, encouraging us to continue their tradition and play a role in "a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."

Library Journal

2017-11-13
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novels, Robinson (The Givenness of Things: Essays, 2015, etc.) gathers trenchant essays about faith, values, and history, most delivered as lectures at religious institutions and universities from 2015 to 2017.Speaking at the University of Virginia, the author told her audience that she discovered, in an article on the internet, a description of herself as personifying "unhipness," a quality that she cheerfully embraces. "I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist," she admits. Her unhipness, though, was given as a warning that readers "will find thinking that is very unlike their own." This fear of contradictory ideas Robinson finds deeply disturbing: history is filled with "erasures and omissions," she asserts, which skew our understanding of our shared heritage. In several essays, for example, she points to mistaken beliefs about capitalism, American exceptionalism, slavery, and the Puritans. "The convention," she writes, "is that Puritan culture was stunted intellectually, emotionally, and morally by the religious tradition that also founded Harvard and, of course, Yale, to name only local examples of their remarkable institution-building and their devotion to learning." In an essay about freedom of conscience, Robinson characterizes "Early American historiography" as "a toxic compound of cynicism and cliché, so false that it falsifies by implication the history of the Western world." She blames nostalgia for the conviction that America "must once have had the authenticity and fellow feeling supposedly to be derived from a common stock," emphasizing the ethnic and religious diversity that flourished since Colonial times. Robinson is at her most lyrical when writing about Barack Obama, whom she much admires and believes to have been the ideal president for 21st-century America: "dignified, gracious, competent, and humane," showing endurance "more than heroic." The author also writes with rueful anger about the vicious slander that her mother saw on Fox News.Sharp, elegant cultural analysis.

Kirkus Reviews

Carrington MacDuffie brings her vocal skills and narrative art to this remarkable collection of Robinson's essays—originally speeches given at various colleges and universities. MacDuffie's elegant intonation comes through in these challenging and thought-provoking works. Her clear delivery gives shape to the complex arguments and rewards the listener as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist ranges from her contrarian appreciation of Puritan texts to contemporary critiques of deterministic science. She particularly lambastes those who miss the connections between metaphysics and the idea of the soul, thereby detaching beauty from religious faith. Robinson's brilliance illuminates this audiobook, and she could have no better narrator than MacDuffie. A.D.M. 2018 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2018 - AudioFile