Tag Archives: Marilynne Robinson

Book Discussion: Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

1sr edition, 1980. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of two sisters growing up in a small northwestern town painfully aware that “the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.” Ruth and Lucille’s struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Marilyn Robinson is one of America’s great living authors. The Library Book Club will discuss Housekeeping on June 28 at 12:00 in the Library Conference Room. Distance students and faculty are invited to join in via Collaborate Ultra.

The first chapter and an excerpt from the audiobook are available free on the Macmillan website. Explanatory materials and an audio lecture about the book are available on the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read website.

For more information about this event, Contact Harold Henkel at harohen@regent.edu.

Book Discussion with Dr. Michael Palmer

Marilynne Robinson is one of the great living American novelists. She is also a Christian who takes theology seriously. Lila, published last October, is her third novel set in the fictional prairie town of Gilead, Iowa. The narrative focuses on the courtship and marriage of the town’s pastor, Rev. John Ames with Lila, a drifter and itinerant worker who shows up in his church one day because it’s the only available shelter from the rain. The couple is brought together by their appreciation of the beauty of nature and the possibility of grace. The novel ends with the birth of their son.

On Thursday, March 26 at 12:00, Dr. Michael Palmer, Professor of Philosophy in the School of Divinity, will lead a discussion of Lila in the Library Conference Room. Distance students and faculty are invited to join in via Google Hangouts: https:plus.google.comhangouts_eventc0lnc83s5ok7tecuqdcnjg0mcno?authuser=0&eid=100028809078157626561&hl=en.

For more information about this or other literature events at the Library, see the Library Book Club webpage, or contact Harold Henkel at harohen@regent.edu.

Michael Palmer to lead discussion of Gilead on March 25

On Friday, March 25, at 12:00 in the Library Conference Room, Dr. Michael Palmer will lead a discussion on Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson (b. 1943), is an American essayist and novelist, whose major output divides almost evenly between fiction and nonfiction. In a review of her most recent book, Absence of Mind, a collection of essays about the implications of a purely materialistic conception of science, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes that “[Robinson] makes the case with exceptional elegance and authority – the authority not only of one of the unmistakably great novelists of the age but of a clear and logical mind that is wholly intolerant of intellectual cliché.”

Gilead (2004), Robinson’s second novel, takes place in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa in 1956, and consists wholly of the reminiscences of the Reverend John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist pastor. While Ames’s father was a Christian pacifist, his grandfather was a radical abolitionist who rode with John Brown and fought in the Civil War. Among other things, the book traces the development of American Calvinism from the first half of the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. But what really makes reading Gilead such a moving experience is Ames’ love and gratitude for the fullness of life, the recognition of the sacred in the seemingly ordinary. In an interview, Robinson has said that “One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that…there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you. This is the individualism that you find in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.”

Michael Palmer is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the School of Divinity. He teaches courses on moral theory and ethics and topics in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy. His published works include the widely-used Elements of a Christian Worldview, a study of Plato’s Cratylus, and articles on ethics, culture, and Pentecostal themes.

The Library has three copies of Gilead. To check out one of the Library’s copies or to request a free excerpt, please contact Harold Henkel at harohen@regent.edu.