The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
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The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04  ·  rating details  ·  299 ratings  ·  58 reviews

In this award-winning collection, the bestselling author of Gilead offers us other ways of thinking about history, religion, and society. Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bibl...more
Paperback, 263 pages
Published November 1st 2005 by Picador (first published 2000)
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Adam
Adam rated it 4 of 5 stars
A dissenter's point of view of the modern world, and the uncriticized assumptions and biases that it possesses. Robinson's flawless prose doesn't hurt either. Plus, her basic methodology is this:

1) I am a relatively intelligent person,
2) I consider myself capable of reading and understanding those thinkers and authors who have shaped the world
3) rather than reading the partisans who either deify or malign those thinkers, why don't I read them myself, and decide for myself...more
Jacob
Jacob rated it 3 of 5 stars
Marilynne Robinson is SERIOUS about ideas and Christianity and primary texts and the prevailing emptiness of American culture at present and the lightweightness of most semi-intellectuals. I love all this rigor.

And yet... sometimes she seems deliberately difficult. Demanding to the point of obscurity.
Tim
Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars
A sharp collection of essays. The introduction calls them contrarian and they are. Robinson never bows to consensus, is never cowardly in her choice of topics. If those choices do not always seem timely (especially the focus on Calvin), they certainly engaged me. Aside from Calvin she also addresses the Puritans (a favorite topic of mine - her discussion of modern priggishness as opposed to the Puritan vision of life is a delight), the loss of the humanities, and the modern rule of economics...more
Joseph Pensak
Joseph Pensak rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: essays
A defense of John Calvin from the halls of the UIowa Creative Writing Department? The sky is falling.
Megan
Megan rated it 5 of 5 stars
Shelves: utopia
Marilynne Robinson is a gift. The common thread through all of these diverse essays (ranging in topic from Darwinism to Maguerite de Navarre with many nods to John Calvin) is her loyalty to them. Its rare for a writer to so fully know their own mind and speak about what is important to her with such authority. She knows her subjects well and she knows the biases that the reader (me) carries with them. After reading this book I felt like I had met many historical figures for the first time. Becau...more
Tara
Tara rated it 5 of 5 stars
Oh, Marilynne. You made me want to read John Calvin. I only recently decided to read Augustine instead of judging him after reading other people talk about him, and now you've made me want to read Calvin.

Marilynne Robinson has one of the fairest, wisest minds I've ever encountered. When she makes a judgment I trust it, and that doesn't happen all too often. The lady read Marx and Calvin and everyone else. She read the source material. Our culture is throwing away the past with abandon...more
Justin Evans
Justin Evans rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: essays
Great prose, backed with some good ideas and some dubious ones. Robinson makes sweeping generalizations that'll rub you the wrong way if you have any 'intellectual' pretensions at all, as I do, but most of them are fairly accurate. Her hope with this book is that her readers will go back to the study of history, or rather, the history of ideas, and take it very seriously. The problem is that the study of the history of ideas she seems to prefer is a little, well, tendentious: the 'truth' about C...more
Mike
Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars
The literature that I celebrate - remember or cherish the most, I suppose - is the literature that causes either little or large psychological revolutions, depending on the scale of the book (or the skill of the author). That an author - an author who wrote two of my favorite books I read last year - decided to write, at length, so astoundingly on the nature of modern thought itself was an opportunity not to be missed.

And boy was it not to be. The magnitude to which my process of tho...more
Ben
Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars
"Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is."

Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays is a deeply rewarding, if occasionally trying, selection of her shorter works. In these eleven essays, Robinson turns her discerning eye on the framework of contemporary American culture. While The Death of Adam addresses a variety of topics, her most compelling essays revolve around the interaction between society and nature, arguing vehemently in support of a wi...more
Jessica
Jessica marked it as to-read
I found this today at the thrift store, and instantly started weeping into a slightly chipped Flushing Fairgrounds commemorative mug. Reading this will be my reward if I somehow manage to produce two papers by Wednesday.

I looooooove you Marilynne Robinson! I can't wait to find out what it is that you have to say.

Booksters will have to wait breathlessly and see if I emerge at the other end a confirmed Calvinist.
Lobstergirl
I hadn't read any of Robinson's well-regarded novels or essays when I came across this collection by accident, misshelved at the library, just a New Yorker review that mentioned she was serious about religion. She is, very (although she calls herself a pagan too). What she is undoubtedly is a scholar. She reads texts closely, and she unhesitatingly criticizes those who haven't bothered to (including Lord Acton, Max Weber, Simon Schama, and Daniel Dennett, all faulted for their misreadings of ...more
Mary
Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for: Anyone who gets a kick out of opinionated and well argued essays with a theological bent.
The best defense--the only defense of Calvinist thought I've ever read. Robinson's lovely long sentences wind you around a thought and drop you easily on the other side. I'd love to talk with someone about her faith-based arguments.
Joseph Kugelmass
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times -- nobody reads good essays about contemporary Calvinism anymore!
Daniel Lower
An intriguing collection of essays about modern thought and historical controversies, particularly regarding what happens when Calvinist theology is situated in its actual context, Calvin's money-quotes are given their actual context (or maybe rather, modern Calvinism being given the context of Calvin), and also regarding what happens when the dominant--and even the counter-cultural-- narratives of our culture don't quite work. Ends on a minor key. But quite good for those who want to see an exp...more
Sarahlynn Lester
Sarahlynn Lester is currently reading it
This one is slow going, but rewarding. So far I've got: we have this idea that what we learn in school is strictly for the purposes of obtaining a grade, credit, or diploma rather than the knowledge being an end unto itself. So by adding things to the curriculum we make them obsolete.

Also, John Calvin has been horribly misrepresented in many scholarly texts.

And there was something else really important from the beginning of the introduction but I'll need to wait until the boo...more
Kathleen
Robinson is an amazing scholar and writer, of boundless wisdom and compassion. It doesn't seem to trouble her at all to take the unpopular or unconventional view of things, which might surprise people who connect this book with some kind of conventional morality or reinstatement of Puritanical Calvinism. In fact, she shows us the evidence that John Calvin was not a puritanical prude but was in fact a French thinker, Jean Cauvin. And she shows us his "warts and all" as they say.
...more
Steven
Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars
Marilynne Robinson's deep intellect and lifelong study of Christian intellectuals is on full display in this collection of essays. The two essays at its heart, which give an exhaustive history and study of John Calvin's lost influence in contemporary Christianity, are definitely only for the intrepid reader willing to parse through the theological discourse to find Ms. Robinson's astute points about what so-called religious people have lost in America's homogenized versions of the various Chris...more
Petrea
While I loved her novel, Gilead, I found this book of essays tough going. for one thing she seemed to be having an argument with someone and we never got to hear that side---but I think it was with her fellow college professors who are apparently cynical about religion--she certainly used a vocabulary and sentences meant to impress them! Sometimes her sentences and phrases were really amazing, but mostly I don't think one needs to try that hard to say what one believes--if one is sure about on...more
Bronson
I chose to give this book 3 stars because I am only comparing it to her novels and I enjoyed those more. This was an interesting work and for me it was worthwhile because of one essay, Psalm 8 and that boiled down to one paragraph. There aren't many paragraphs that I would consider merit reading 263 pages just to be able to experience one thought, but for me this is one of those. I'll quote it here and hope that Marilynne Robinson isn't offended that I cite the whole paragraph. See what you t...more
Amy
Amy rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Amy by: Nora
This is a book about America, specifically about the religious thought that has influenced our country's formation and changes. The first few essays tackle subjects ranging from Darwinism to the abolitionists. For a while I could see similarities between these essays and some of Wendell Berry's. Both value community and question things we consider to be "progress."

That was all fine by me, but I am admitting that I am not finishing this book. I was actually taking notes, ev...more
Jason
Despite the likelihood that the intellectually concordal relationship between John Calvin and Marguerite de Navarre deserves a book of its own in which to breathe (its treatment feels too circumscribed in the 52 pages allotted it here), and despite "Wilderness" feeling too much like an afterthought written in the wake of Robinson's controversial Mother Country (or a warm-up to that book), and despite the final piece ("The Tyranny of Petty Coercion") exhibiting (at times) the ...more
Tim
Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars
cranky and brainy essays by a wonderful novelist, author of gilead and housekeeping -- A large part of her argument is rehabilitating aspects of christian tradition that are in disfavor in our time: calvin, the puritans, mcguffey readers and the abolitionist christian culture of the 19th c. midwest. She also weighs in against Darwinism, in a surprisingly convincing essay.
Adriel
Adriel rated it 4 of 5 stars
I grew up in the Calvinist Reformed tradition, but this book helped me think about Calvin in a new light. I think I'm going to pick up some biographies and the Institutes to think about recasting the American political tradition in relation to Calvin contra Locke and Smith. We'll see what can be done...
Alisa
Alisa rated it 4 of 5 stars
Very thought provoking. Full disclosure: Didn't finish it. I read the essay on Darwin which really messed with me and the one on family, which is reprinted elsewhere. It articulated some disturbing trends in our culture that I agree with, but felt shaken by it just the same. Not a light read.
Simona
Simona rated it 5 of 5 stars
So far brilliant, but I am forced to read it slowly, in order to fully process the connections she draws between things like Calvinism, the act of writing, social darwinism, science, faith etc. Incredibly insightful. She is one of my favorite contemporary writers.
Tom
Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars
Shelves: essays
A rigorous but accessible thinker. Writes about religious themes without maudlin piety, though a devoted Christian herself. "Psalm Eight" is good example. Much different from her fiction, surprisingly so.
Catharine
Worth reading, but several essays were drier and harder work than I expected. Perhaps it's that her fictional and personal writing is better than her 'straight' historical and theological writing.
Emily Anne
In this collection of essays Robinson takes issue with the lack of theological thinking in America at the present time. She highlights the theological ideas (focusing on Calvinism) on which the American political and educational systems were built. Robinson laments not that Americans have forgotten religion, but have forgotten their theology. She looks the modern American trend toward convenience, proclaiming that Americans have been too willing to trade the beauty of language, place/landscap...more
Jason
Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars
So refreshing to read a learned scholar who is sympathetic to the world view of those who cling to faith. Although her Calvinism is hard for me to follow.
Heidi
Heidi rated it 4 of 5 stars
I particularly love the essay "Puritans and Prigs," about how Americans are always mis-described as Puritanical when they are actually being priggish.
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The Death Of Adam: Essays On Modern Thought
The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Paperback)

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Her 1980 novel, Housekeeping, won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her second novel, Gilead, was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award.

Her third novel, Home, was published in ...more
More about Marilynne Robinson...
Gilead Housekeeping Home Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

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