Many consider Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson the best American prose writer around. In addition to her much -acclaimed and spiritual novels, she’s a tough-minded essayist and contrarian, even though she doesn’t consider herself a contrariarn at all. For sure, she’s an intellectual and religious force to contend with.
Here are quotes from her interview with Bob Abernathy for PBS-TV’s “Religion & Ethics News Weekly” back in September:
On growing up in the “emptiness” of Idaho: “That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence. It always seemed as if there was something extraordinary around me. The holy is at the origins of everything that exists. Everything.
On her regular attendance at the Congregation United Church of Christ in Iowa City where she sometimes preaches: “I think of them as being people who are serious about things that deserve, you know, serious attention, for example, social problems. They are very open to acknowledging the value of other religious traditions and tend very much away from harsh judgments.
On the 16th-century reformer John Calvin, who she says was far more compassionate than his stern reputation suggests—for instance, about forgiveness. “The assumption is that forgiveness is owed wherever God might want forgiveness to be given, and we don’t know, so you err on the side of forgiving. You assume your fallibility, and you also assume that anybody that you encounter is precious to God—or is God himself.”
On the so-called new atheist writers:: I think this sort of avalanche of literature we have gotten lately is very second-rate. It simply is not well informed and not well considered. I consider it to be kind of noise.
On popular and commercial-driven culture: “The idea that everything always has to push some extreme, you know, be more violent, be more sort of disrespectful of human life, and so on—there’s a cynicism about it, things that have to do with mayhem, that make it look like it would be a lot of fun, you know, to wipe out your adversaries or something like that, that really treat people like dispensable, you know, items.
“I think it is a serious distraction (to religious life). We have to think that people are sacred. Human beings have to be considered sacred. That’s the beginning.”
On the political climate: “It’s a little shocking when you hear people say, like about this health thing we’re going through now, what’s in it for me, you know? That’s a huge change in the basic values of the culture. I got sort of tired when I was a kid of hearing people say you have to leave the world better than you found it. But now I think I would burst into tears if somebody said that to me—just, what a lovely thought, you know?”
On being a contrarian: “A lot of the things that I criticize, I think, are in their impact inhumane. My loyalty really is to human loveliness, and the deep experience of self that every self deserves, you know, and the deep acknowledgment that everyone owes to everyone else. If you were to think of yourself looking back on life, I think that some of the things that would please you most deeply are that at some moment you were—you comforted your child, or in one way or another you soothed, you fed, you were adequate, you know? These things are very beautiful and, I think, sacramental.”
