marilynne robinson

Breaking up is hard to do, and I am not at all prepared to discard my deep love and admiration for novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson . Among her novels, I treasure Lila in particular for its…

Readers of RD don’t need to be told that the image of “The First Thanksgiving” that Americans carry around in their heads is mainly the product of 19th century romanticism: Longfellow with a dash of…

Fundamentalist Christian support for President Trump is a commonly known, if poorly understood, political dynamic in the United States today. That support sometimes takes surprising shape to outsiders…

At 400 pages, Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream examines in appropriate depth the “mystery just how America’s once-austere and communal…

Late last month, when my pastor Isaac Villegas was getting his ministerial credentials suspended for officiating a same-sex wedding, I suddenly remembered an email he sent me in 2014, when I—through…

What inspired you to write If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right? I really wanted to figure something out: what the surprising, strange, unexpected return…

Theology, which influences so much of public discourse, should not be the exclusive property of the faithful.

The King James Bible may well be the greatest work of literature ever written by committee—and now we know a bit more about the collaboration that produced it. Jeffrey Allen Miller, an English…

Randall Balmer on Jimmy Carter, the role of the president’s faith, and the real reason for the rise of the Religious Right.

What inspired you to write Spider in a Tree? I live in Northampton, Massachusetts, across the road from a beautiful cemetery. It’s quiet there, with lots of big, generous trees and many old…