Marilynne Robinson: belief

Transcript context

…How has the Book of Genesis influenced your fiction writing? I think it has actually influenced Western literature, English-language literature to a point where it’s very difficult to say where the influence begins. I think that there’s nothing in ancient literature that approaches it in terms of characterization, and there’s very little in modern literature that also would approach it from that point of view. It’s these people who are rather obscure figures in the human world and overlapping generations of herdsmen. They’re incredibly strongly differentiated and characterized. I think that that’s something that has been an influence on all Western literature. How much do you feel that we moderns should feel free to do a pick and choose from Genesis, or from the Old Testament more generally? You write quite a bit about themes of grace and reconciliation in Genesis, and they clearly are there, say, in the Joseph story. But if you look at, say, God destroying almost the entire world through the flood, or you look at some of the battles fought in Deuteronomy, it doesn’t seem to be grace at all.…

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