"The Courage to See It": Toward an Understanding of Glory

If one generalization might be made about Marilynne Robinson's body of work, both fiction and nonfiction (risky and presumptuous as I realize such a gesture to be), it is that her writing urges us again and again to pay attention to what she calls in her first novel, Housekeeping, the "resurrection of the ordinary" (18). As anyone with even a passing familiarity with Robinson's work knows, her project is deeply embedded in a rich Christian theology-one that considers "fragments of the quotidian" (64) (another winsome phrase from Housekeeping) integral to any conception of the holy. Significantly, Robinson's theology is explicitly and insistently Calvinist; in interview after interview, in her essays and speeches, she invokes John Calvin as central to her artistic mission.