Tag Archives: Marilynne Robinson

Reading JACK While Rioters Rampage

I happened to be reading Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel, Jack, as rioters attacked the U.S. capitol in Washington.

The man, Jack, is the wayward son of a loving family (white) headed by a Christian minister in Iowa. He has appeared briefly in other novels in Robinson’s award winning Gilead series, arriving, then leaving again.

Jack knows his sins, despises himself for them, but seems trapped. He is now further trapped as he and Della, a young colored woman, a teacher, fall in love. This is post World War II in St. Louis, Missouri, when romantic relationships between races are not only forbidden but despised.

I read this novel depicting racism, one of America’s greatest sins, even while a mob of white Americans, some waving Confederate flags, attacked the capitol. They are unable to accept the election of a certain president and vice-president. The president-elect is an older white man. The vice-president elect is a woman of color.

May God show mercy on us and help us find our way to repent of the hatred we have allowed to continually fester within us.

When is debt an investment?

Education is free for American schoolchildren, but salaries for teachers are paid for by taxes. They are part of the public “debt.”

However, most of us would agree that the country benefits from an educated population. Isn’t the money we pay for those free schools more of an investment than a debt?

After secondary school, education generally is not free. In fact, over the past few decades, colleges and university have grown beyond the ability of many American families to afford.

Writes novelist Marilynne Robinson: “As state financing fell, tuitions rose, involving many students in burdensome debt. For generations people had, in effect, prepaid their children’s and grandchildren’s tuition and underwritten the quality of their education by paying taxes. Suddenly the legislatures decided to put the money to other uses, or to cut taxes, and families were obliged to absorb much higher costs.” (What Are We Doing Here? Essays)

Learning, Robinson points out, no longer fits into the economic equation.

But, of course it does. It’s one of those long term costs not addressed when only material costs are calculated.

Polluted streams in Montana are a cost passed on to ordinary people. If they drink the water, they will sicken, perhaps die. If the government pays to restore the streams, the costs are passed to citizens in the form of higher taxes. The companies, who mined but did not pay for preventing pollution. get off with more profit now paid for by citizens.

Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy writes: “For too long, governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards: the public has paid the price for cleaning up messes, but the benefits of those cleanups have accrued largely to companies and their investors.” (“Capitalism After the Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020.)

Mazzuecato suggests a long term view for our economic policies. Stakeholders in our economy, the workers, who also are consumers, need help to weather economic downturns and again be able to both work and consume.

In these and other instances, government “debt” is more of an investment.

Small Fires and Internet Slander

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”

After this quote from Christian scriptures (James 3:5), Marilynne Robinson continues an essay on “Slander” in her book, What Are We Doing Here?

Both Christian and Hebrew scriptures emphasize the power of the tongue to harm. Robinson writes: “ . . malicious speech ranks among the gravest transgressions.” As an example of grievous harm by slanderers, she points out the slurs against Jews during the Middle Ages, paving the way for the Holocaust centuries later.

It’s not surprising that Robinson calls many of the stories circulating on the internet a modern version of slander.

Two final quotes from Robinson’s book:

“Many people now think in terms of a Manichaean struggle between secularism and all we hold dear. On these grounds they have launched an attack on American civil society, formally a famous strength, which they see as secular because it is nonsectarian. . .

“If we are to continue as a democracy, we must find a way to stabilize the language and temper of our debates and disputes.”

Religion and Writing: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

“So it is conventional among contemporary writers to exclude religion from their work, however religious the writers might in fact be. This reticence seems to be regarded by many as a courtesy, an acknowledgment of the fact that the subject can be painful or private or can stir prejudices or hostilities. Such scruples are respectable, certainly, but they tacitly reinforce the assumption that religion is essentially and inevitably divisive.”
–Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? “Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith”)

Yet, Robinson’s novel Gilead, as well as the two accompanying novels in the series, were critically acclaimed. Gilead, whose main character was a Christian minister, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.

Humans can be capable of great cruelty, using whatever weapon is at hand, including religion.

A counterweight against cruelty, however, also is provided by religion—ministering to the excluded, for example: lepers, widows and orphans, prisoners, refugees.

Religion, at its best, searches for an inner journey leaving behind the quest for wealth and power fueling so many of our cruelties.