Marilynne Robinson promotes reason in unreasonable times

MARILYNNE ROBINSON IS A DISSIDENT, THOUGH SHE MAY not sound like one. The 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and acclaimed essayist has made a peaceable career of rejecting commonly held opinions to look for a deeper truth. Her fiction and nonfiction alike have found a home in the hearts of American intellectuals like Barack Obama as well on best-seller lists. She’s a humanist, a Congregationalist, an artist and a student of history, and she makes her readers want to be more thoughtful people.

The essays in her new collection, What Are We Doing Here?, are mostly lectures that she gave at universities. The pieces are erudite, and often long. “I impose on the patience of my audience from time to time,” she tells TIME. “That’s a fact.” And though these lectures critique the “thems” of the world—politicians who exploit their constituents, journalists who reinforce “whatever gimmicky notion is in the air,” academics who