In an extended dialogue between Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama, published a few years ago in the New York Review of Books, Obama homes in on the dimension of Robinson’s writing that makes her so unusual as a 21st-century literary figure. “You’re a novelist,” he observes, “but you’re also – can I call you a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? You care a lot about Christian thought.”
Robinson wears her faith on the sleeves of
