Story, Culture, & the Common Good with Marilynne Robinson

Aug 26, 2025

Marilynne Robinson, a celebrated novelist and essayist known for her profound works on faith and American history, delves into the power of storytelling as a tool for truth and community-building. She emphasizes the sacred uniqueness of every individual and the beauty found in literature. Robinson discusses navigating motherhood and identity in a secular world, alongside the importance of empathy, creativity, and engaging with diverse perspectives. The conversation also touches on the need for hope in times of civil unrest and the transformative potential of generosity.

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INSIGHT

Every Life Holds Sacred Complexity

Marilynne Robinson argues every human life is uniquely brilliant, complex, and sacred.
She says we commonly fail to notice or honor that inherent worth.

INSIGHT

Beauty Is Central To Literature

Robinson observes modern literary criticism often sidelined aesthetic judgments like beauty.
She warns that excluding beauty undermines reading and writing of great literature.

ADVICE

Train Yourself To See Beauty

Look closely at ordinary things and watch how light and life reveal beauty.
Choose to notice rather than relegate things to 'ordinary' and you will discover beauty.

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Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’re focusing on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Today’s episode concludes our summer series. Our guide today is the acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson, author of the Gilead series, and much else.

In this episode, originally an Online Conversation recorded in 2020, Marilynne reflects on the art of writing as a means of exploring truth and engaging questions around learning to live well, to love others, and to create a home and community, in our fractious world:

“The unique brilliance of a human being … is something that we tend utterly to disparage, demean, utterly fail to notice … every person lives out a [life] beautiful, complicated, inaccessible to other consciousnesses. And it is sacred.”

And if this conversation resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too.

Marilynne Robinson's Novels | Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack, Reading Genesis

Article in Breaking Ground from our event.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Moby Dick, by Herman Mellville

Piers Plowman, by William Langland

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Sacred and Profane Love | A Trinity Forum Reading by John Donne
Bulletins from Immortality | A Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson
Confessions | A Trinity Forum Reading by Saint Augustine
Brave New World | A Trinity Forum Reading by Aldous Huxley

Marilynne Robinson is a novelist, essayist, and teacher, one of the most renowned and revered of living writers. Her novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Lila, and Home have been variously honored with the Pulitzer Prize, National Books Critics Circle Award (twice), a Hemingway Foundation Award, an Orange Prize, The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Ambassador Book Award. She's also the author of many essays and non-fiction works, including her work, “Mother Country”, and her essay collections, “Death of Adam,” “Absence of Mind,” “When I was a Child I Read Books,” “The Givenness of Things,” and “What Are We Doing Here?”. She's the recipient of the National Humanities Medal and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her writing has spent over 20 years teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, as well as several universities.