A writer’s book, not a scholar’s; it has no footnotes. Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts.

This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not.

On the face of it, Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis.

Her take on the ultimate sacred text in her tradition, the origin of it all, is fervent and expansive yet also remarkably unyielding, even dogmatic.

To seasoned readers of Robinson, this will come as no surprise; she has never written for anyone’s approval. Her work is not so much out of fashion as devoid of its possibility.

Complete with narrative arc and flawed characters who are ever worthy of redemption.

Boiling down Reading Genesis to intertextual and grammatical awareness or theological box-checking misses what is distinctive about this deep and sagacious work.

Robinson’s reading is full of telling details and keenly observed parallels.

n luminous prose she challenges a modern reader to understand just how unusual a book Genesis is, pregnant with meaning that stretches to our own day.

She reads scripture as sensitively as she has shaped her novels, and, as a Calvinist, she brings a coherent theology to bear. But I suspect that her main preparation for this project was in the pulpit. The proper work of preaching and religious teaching, to my mind, is simply love, Robinson’s great topic in the novels—not romantic love but the helpless needs and attachments of the family. She bolsters the old hope that, when women get more power and more audible voices, these will be constructive and moderate on this instinctive basis.

Marilynne Robinson always been a theologian at heart...It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point.

Robinson’s reading is full of telling details and keenly observed parallels.

Throughout this deeply involving and enlightening exegesis, Robinson links Genesis to the profound dilemmas of our time..

Deeply thoughtful.

A dense yet immersive close reading of the book of Genesis.