A Novelist's Thoughts On The MindMarilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Gilead" portrays an aging, dying minister in a small Iowa town who reflects upon his life and family, on God, and on the United States for the benefit of his young son. The book is written eloquently and poignantly. "Gilead" is thoughtful in its simplicity, but never forgets its form as a work of fiction.I was eager to read more of Robinson. Instead of turning to her other novels, I found her recent book of essay...

Robinson dazzles me again with her non-fiction, this a somewhat continuation of what she explored in "The Death of Adam," that is the lack of intellectualism in today's religions. The difference is here she explores the proliferation of what she calls "parascience" - those thinkers from Bertrand Russell to today's Hitchens and Hawkins, who believe that since science has explained much of what the brain does, religion is no longer necessary. She refutes this claim and instead posits that even tho...

I'm not normally interested in apologetics (i.e., rational defense of religion), and I didn't give this dense book the careful reading it requires, but I'm drawn to Robinson's sense that modern "parascientific" accounts of humanity have a deeply limiting conception of the human mind. Reducing us all to a bund of evolutionary impulses just isn't very interesting, never mind that it overlooks the collected wisdom of thousands of years of spiritual, cultural, and artistic traditions. "What is man t...

Absence of Mind collects several essays by novelist Marilynne Robinson, which were originally delivered as part of Yale's Terry Lectures in 2009. In them, she critiques positivism and its inheritance to many modern scientists who discount metaphysics and subjective experience in their inquiries. She particularly takes issue with those she calls "parascientists" (e.g., Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett) who reject subjective evidence in their exploration of consciousness and the nature of humanity, but do...

Philosophy is one of those things that people think they don't have when in reality all of us do. There are thoughts, ideas, and understandings that shape how we see reality and these form our philosophy whether we know it or not. One of the ideas that seems to be guiding more and more of us is that science has all answers that are worth knowing and any answer that cannot be proved or measured by science is therefore worthless or nonsensical. On the surface this would seem like a fair statement....

I have a hard time with Marilynne Robinson's non-fiction--I find her essays to be a little too allusive, too oblique, too given to assuming I know things that I don't know. I just have a hard time following her. I'm often unsure whether she's being ironic. Other readers seem not to have these problems. Nevertheless, from the 66% of this that I think I understood, I certainly was convinced. She comes down very hard on the "parascience" of our time--the Steven Pinkers, E.O. Wilsons, Daniel Dennett...

Review title: Incident or accident?The great metaphysician Jimmy Buffet worked that question into a song lyric worth quoting hereNow we're back where we belongWithout a clue and still withoutA master planIncident or accidentIt all depends on if you're meantTo understand apropos to the subject of Absence of Mind, this slim volume of essays by Robinson. The Mind as incident (intentional existence) or accident (Darwinian evolution) is very much present in Robinson's mind as she writes these essays

Robinson was invited by Yale to give the Terry lectures on the relationship between science and religion. These essays are the result of that invitation. It is quite easy to see why Yale wanted Robinson to give these lectures (in 2009). She had produced a first novel that was luminescent in its implied spirituality and, after that, Gilead, which explicitly deals with two Christian ministers and their theological beliefs--in an extraordinarily moving fashion. She had also published her fine essay...

It's a pleasure to read such good writing!The author, whose novels I have very much enjoyed and would equally highly recommend, is here defending the importance of individual introspection. She eloquently defends the power and importance of 'each of us living intensely within herself or himself' through our human consciousness and she argues that the rich data (the arts, history and culture - past and present) is relevant in our account of the brain and should find its way back in to the science...

The author was featured on The Daily Show and is from Iowa. The book sounded interesting so I picked it up. It is a short book, but don't let that fool you. The author writes in difficult prose more suited for a book on philosophy. The main premise is very interesting and relevant as a balance to the scientific discoveries of the past few centuries. The premise is that evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis have taken away from our inward self. They do this by claiming to be able to explain all

In this collection of essays, Marilynne Robnson starts out as a critic. Her targets are those scientific writers of the 20th and 21st centuries who have sought to take the products of contemporary scientific inquiry and blend them into a coherent commentary on the meaning of life and the universe for the general public. Ms. Robinson does not like their method of inquiry, their style of presentation or their conclusions. She labels it “parascience,” and indeed it is. The scientists in question in...

Eh. A rambling, less coherent extension of the essay 'Darwinism' in her "Death of Adam," this one deals with what Robinson calls 'parascience,' essentially, the kind of populist journalism written by Dennet, Dawkins, Pinker and their ilk, with the 'problem' of altruism for their dogma, and with Freud. The argument here is weaker than in 'Darwinism,' and simultaneously more polemical, which means people are going to give this one star on the basis that Robinson is a crazy religious nut-bag who do...

In "Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self," Marilynne Robinson writes a concise, stimulating rebuttal against modern "para-scientific" thinkers who promulgate a materialist view of humankind. Like C.S. Lewis excoriating Gaius and Titius in "The Abolition of Man," Marilynne Robinson takes aim at certain thinkers, particularly Sigmund Freud, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Auguste Comte, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. She critiques the belief that humans a...