Tag: marilynne robinson

By Scott Korb

On its face, Marilynne Robinson’s tightly packed new book Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self may appear to be just another salvo in the ongoing war between religion (books) and science (books). And by temperament, my own sympathies typically lie with those writers ostensibly in the religion camp—Karen Armstrong, say, or Chris Hedges, or recently, even Adam Gopnik—whose books and essays and lectures usually aim to suggest, on the one hand, a common theme of compassion running through religious teachings, and on the other, a complexity and inwardness to religious belief that science (books)—or, “parascience,” as Robinson puts it—ignores, or, at the very least, minimizes. As a case for religion, Absence of Mind dutifully fires its shots. Take for instance what Robinson says early on about Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Robinson just happens “to have in hand” as she writes. (It could, after all, be any number of these parascientific books.)

Dennett sheers off the contemplative side of faith, its subjectivity, as if the collective expressions of religion and the inward experience of it were nonoverlapping magisteria, as if religion were only what could be observed using the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there.

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