Robinson interview

Here's a rewarding interview with Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist. As the introduction says, she's "a Christian whose faith is not easily reduced to generalities." Indeed. Aside from being a very good writer, I think I would describe her as a philosopher; someone who loves knowledge and is deeply interested in reality in all the ways it comes to us. I'm posting the link here because she talks about both science and religion.

On religion:

Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about.
Or:
The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don’t behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people.

On science:

I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don’t merge in a comprehensible way, that’s a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.
...Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

And:

I’m not terribly persuaded by the word supernatural. I don’t like the idea of the world as an encapsulated reality with intrusions made upon it selectively. The reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We’re right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it. If you read somebody like Wallace Stevens, he’s basically saying the same thing.

She also talks about the relationship between religion and science, about beauty, about Lincoln and Marx, about "puritanical hedonism," and well, lots of other things.