Serious faith
To my mother’s chagrin and in spite of her relentless efforts, I did not read books as a child. I read only baseball box scores. Then Edvart Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth captivated me in high school, and I’ve been reading books ever since.
I loved Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead and Home, with their wise and sensitive portrayals of faith, church, family and aging clergy. Usually when religion appears in fiction and particularly when that religion is Christianity, it is presented as simplistic, treated as a cliché and dismissed. Many best-selling works suggest that religion is a waste of time at best and toxic, anti-intellectual and violent at worst. When I saw that Robinson had published a new collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, I immediately ordered it.
In reviewing the book in the Century ("When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson"), Peter Boumgarden said that Robinson’s book “offers a model for engagement with science, policy and the humanities by an author who takes these fields as seriously as she does her faith.” I’m impressed by how seriously Robinson takes her Christian faith. She is learned in history, biblical scholarship and theology. And she is a Calvinist. While Calvin and Calvinism are popularly understood as the burden of the lifelong Presbyterian, or are misunderstood and trivialized, Robinson knows and appreciates Calvin.
