What Are We Doing Here?

"What are We Doing Here?" by Marilynne Robinson is a collection of essays written by one of America's foremost authors and public intellectuals. Her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila are beautiful, carefully crafted classics and this collection shows the depth of her quiet erudition. The collection has all of her typical interests: University education, the Puritans, John Calvin, American Literature, American Politics and Society. Robinson is a careful thinker and, if I am honest, her prose is not the easiest thing to read. You want to go carefully through such a collection. But it is worth your time. Personally, I find her commentaries on American life moderately more interesting than her theological work but when you read such a collection, you can come to see that all of her thought is part of a seamless garment and you cannot have one aspect without all the others. Her careful theological exploration is essential to her commentary about American life and visa-versa. In this collection, I found the following chapters the strongest: "What Are We Doing Here?" "Theology for this Moment," "The American Scholar Now," "Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself," and "Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition." But I want to especially highlight "A Proof, A Test, An Instruction" as one of the single best retrospectives on Barack Obama and responses to the election of Donald Trump that has been written. I might have given this book a full five stars but I feel that it can get slightly repetitive and could have done with one or two fewer pieces.