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Marilynne Robinson Award Winning Author

Robinson (née Summers) was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.

Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.

She is also the author of non-fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989),The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), and When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012). She has written articles, essays and reviews forHarper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.

She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst‘ MFA Program for Poets and Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship atYale University, giving a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2011 Robinson delivered Oxford University‘s annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university’s Rothermere American Institute. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She was the keynote speaker for the Workshop’s 75th anniversary celebration in June 2011. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa. Read More…

Entering the Age of Human Rights and Pluralism: Public Religion in Canada from MacKenzie King to Trudeau

 George Egerton PhD, Professor Emeritus History, UBC

What wisdom can we find in the longer history of engagement between religion and politics in Canadian history which can shed some light on our present choices? These are some concluding remarks.

First, I would argue that the resistance of some fundamentalist Protestants and Quebec ultra-Catholics to the protection of human rights, an aversion mixed sometimes with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, is to be shunned by all Christians. Both Protestant and Catholic forms of Christianity developed rich theological rationales for human rights protection, both internationally and nationally; this framework should be powerfully sustained in contemporary theological and political engagements.

However, the leftist, social gospel wing of Protestantism, represented in such figures as John Humphrey, Frank Scott, King Gordon, and Arthur Roebuck, in embracing the human rights agenda often abandoned any legitimating reference to religious foundations which might prove embarrassing in the context of pluralism. The liberal Protestant Canadian churches have also in the main traveled this path, accommodating liberal cultural agendas of extending human rights without a sense of constraint when this process involved violation of classic religious teachings. The result has been not only debilitating internal division within these churches and the loss of a distinctive prophetic voice in culture, but also the loss of any religious conscience within the secularized governance of Canada. Read More…