Book Review: What are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

I'm of the opinion that any collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson is worth it, and I'm glad that she's consistent enough to be repeating her familiar (by now) themes. In this collection, she rehabilitates New England Puritans and Oliver Cromwell where in previous ones it was John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. She also writes some gorgeous prose about recent scientific discoveries in cosmology and immunology, and then turns around and upbraids the selfish-gene crowd for their shallow philosophy and straw-man depictions of religion. These comprise at least two-thirds of the book and are worth the price of admission easily. Mixed in there's a few essays I disagree with, possibly more strongly than anything else she's written, mostly because she has a few blind spots that she shares with most of academia. Perhaps I have a different perspective as someone who writes for scientists rather than about them, and also as someone whose ears are a little too full of wax to hear the great command "Fear not" as much as I should. It doesn't worry me, I'm sure I'm more wrong than she is about these things. I'm happy to have Robinson goading the scientists with her academic, historically grounded Protestant humanism, and I hope she keeps these coming. Which historical figure gets rehabilitated next, I wonder?