10 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
arilynne Robinson’s ac-
complishments 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 emi-
nence 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 fournovels 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, Gilead, narratedM
ENCOUNTER
This Essentially
Meaningless
Conflict
MARILYNNE ROBINSON on the difference between science and “science”—and
why the former poses no threat to religion.