Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Marilynne Robinson

  • READING THE BIBLE WITH JOY

    Five Proposals for Discovering the Joy of the Bible I’ve lately been puzzling over the Bible. Not the Bible itself but the joylessness of its readers. Or would be readers. In the minds of many the Bible is a forbidding and severe book, a book of thou-shalt-nots. For others, an ancient self-help book that doesn’t…

  • FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

    GRACE FOR AN ANGRY WORLD I’m back. Having spent much of the past couple of months traveling—more on that in subsequent posts—I’ve had the chance to return to the topic I’ve been considering off and on for some time: atonement. The subtext of this discussion is the way that theology often claims to be about…

  • STRETCHING

    We are frequently told by “they”—anonymous experts cited in the popular media—that we should stretch before exercising. Good advice, I suspect, although in all my years of exercise I have never actually stretched. Still don’t. If it’s tennis, I grab a racquet and head for the court. If it’s a jog, I strap on my…

  • THE SUBTLETY OF STORY: NOTES ON READING THE BIBLE

    The story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:10-22) is a marvel of concise storytelling. In the space of just 13 verses, it satirizes not just one ancient holy place but two. It speaks hope and purpose to the scattered people of God. It lays out in brief a theology of election. It allows Jacob to make…

  • Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson

    Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is an occasionally aggravating, sometimes confounding, and almost always brilliant engagement with the first book of the Bible.  The opening paragraph sets her approach to the book. Speaking of the Bible generally, she says that it “is a work of theology, not…

  • SPEAKING TO THE PRESENT AGE: TIM KELLER AND MARILYNNE ROBINSON

    I’ve been writing about Calvin and Calvinism lately, and I mean to write more. I have lately been spending time reading and rereading Calvin’s chapters on divine providence with which he concludes the first book of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. I’ll get back to that and to Calvin’s approach to scripture in subsequent posts, but…

  • RETRIEVING CALVIN. THE FIRST IN A SHORT SERIES: WHAT WE KNOW BEFORE WE KNOW

    We have failed Calvin. I mean the man, Jehan Cauvin, as he was known at the time, not the place. We have read Calvin through the eyes of those who came after, those who created the system known as Calvinism. Calvin was not himself a Calvinist. The late I. John Hesselink notes that: Calvinists come…