This Essentially Meaningless Conflict

MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S accomplishments are impressive by any standard: she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, among other honors. But perhaps a better measure of her eminence as a writer and thinker for our times is this: When the New York Review of Books ran an extended interview with Robinson in November 2015, her interviewer was … President Obama.

Robinson’s fiction and essays display a combination of fierce intelligence and profound human empathy. Her four novels are at once gorgeous, revelatory, and lapidary; her essays, ruthlessly clear and often deeply challenging. At the heart of her work is her Christianity, and from there she explores everything from the prospects for democracy to the role and limits of science in our lives. She is equally comfortable, eloquent, and convincing in discussions of cosmology and the power of the sermon, and she celebrates both science and faith as expressions of our humanity.

We interviewed Robinson via e-mail, and our questions referred specifically to three of her works: her 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, , narrated by the elderly preacher John Ames, and the essays “Proofs” and “Humanism,” from her 2015 collection, . Her responses, which offer only a glimpse of the warm and penetrating brilliance of her thinking and writing, highlight a perspective that we