What Are We Doing Here?: Essays

By Marilynne Robinson

New essays on theological, political, and contemporary themes, by the Pulitzer Prize winner.

Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
What Are We Doing Here? is a call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780771073465

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind (2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Robinson lives in California

Reviews for What Are We Doing Here?

[kr04bps · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

First I listened to the audio book as I drove back and forth to my 94 yo mother's place. So much to think about. I was not raised in the Calvinist tradition, but my Catholic upbringing doesn't seem to get in the way of her thought-provoking discussions of history, literature, grace and beauty. That chapter on Grace and Beauty illuminated my understanding (misunderstanding? ) of Jack. In the first essay, she says the things that we all believe to be true, but are wrong, lead us to misunderstanding "freedom," and "capitalusm" and our public conversation is shallow and slanted as a result. So much to think about as I read these essays and ponder their implucations.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This collection was a mixed bag of academic lectures for a specialized audience and salient op-eds on our current religious and political climate. I do not share Robinson's deep enthusiasm for John Calvin and the Puritans, though I appreciated her perspective. I very much appreciated the essay "Slander" and its implications for religious people. I do which there would have been an organization by content, date, or theme, as well as context for each essay or lecture. Robinson is a skillful writer, but many of these essays do not read well outside a specific academic audience.