Tag Archives: Marilynne Robinson

Robinson: Love, Sympathy, Identification

By Robin Bates | Published: October 7, 2020

Marilynne Robinson’s fiction is, as she puts it, “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged common humanity, Gilead, Jack, Martha Nussbaum | Comments closed

A Teacher, Lit, & a Jailed Student

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2017

In “Reading with Patrick,” English teacher Michelle Kuo works with a student in 8th grade and then later after he has killed a man. The story brings up questions about lit’s impact.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Song of Myself", C. S. Lewis, Frederick Douglass, Gilead, Hansberry (Lorraine), Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lorraine Hansberry, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, poverty, Prison, Raisin in the Sun, Walt Whitman | Comments closed

Genesis: Story Truth, Not Happening Truth

By Robin Bates | Published: June 11, 2017

The creation story in the Book of Genesis is magnificent poetry that resists the attempts of religious and scientific fundamentalists alike to reduce it to a scientific account.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged creation story, creationism, Genesis, religious fundamentalism, Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien | Comments closed

The President Who Loved Literature

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2017

In a remarkable interview with “The New York Times,” Barack Obama spoke about the importance of literature in his life. The range of his reading and the sensitivity of his responses is astounding.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Barack Obama, Bend in the River, Colson Whitehead, Doris Lessing, Ernest Hemingway, Fates and Furies, Garcia Gabriel Marquez, Gilead, Gillian Flynn, Golden Notebook, Gone Girl, Jack Kerouac, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, Lauren Goff, Liu Cixin, Martha Nussbaum, Maxine Hong Kingston, Moveable Feast, Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Philip Roth, Road, Saul Bellow, Song of Solomon, Tempest, Three Body Problem, Toni Morrison, Underground Railroad, V.S. Naipaul, Warrior Woman, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Though Thou Art in Thy Blood, Live

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2015

Spiritual Sunday A couple of weeks ago my library reading group discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third novel in what one member described as a triptych. I love Robinson’s depiction of the Congregationalist minister John Ames in Gilead, and Lila gives us the backstory of the woman that Ames marries as an old man. (Home, […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Bible, Ezekiel, Job, Lila | Comments closed