http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/magazine/the-revelations-of-marilynne-robinson.html

“Being and human beings,” Robinson told me, “are invested with a degree of value that we can’t honor appropriately. An overabundance that is magical.” Honoring that overabundance has taken many forms in Robinson’s writing. Each of her novels, though formally unique, is focused on the movements of a single consciousness; most of her essays, despite their intellectual reach, are devoted to a single historical figure. The essays often express unvarnished frustration over how inaccurately we remember the writers and thinkers she admires most — theologians like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards — reframing what we thought was important about them. “It’s interesting that people systematically misrepresent these pillars,” Robinson said, with astonishment. Calvin is not, as we are taught, a cold creature who claimed we were born preordained to heaven or hell. “Calvin has a strange reputation that is based very solidly on the fact that nobody reads him,” Robinson has said. “I was, and continue to be, struck by the power of the metaphysics and the visionary quality of his theology. . . . [H]e’s terrifically admiring of what the human mind does.”