Short Review: I picked this up because of James KA Smith's review in Comment. That review is excellent. This book I think is less than excellent. I really do love Robinson's writing. She is a great writer and a wide ranging thinker. I love how wide ranging she is. At one point she is talking about another author writing outside of their main field and quips that she isn't going to complain about that since she frequently does the same thing.
But as an essayist I find her unpersuasive, maybe because I start many of her essays already agreeing with her basic point. Smith suggests that she is his favorite Calvinist liberal. Maybe I appreciate her less because I tend to be liberal socially and politically already.
I am also done with her defense of Jonathan Edwards and Puritanism. I get it. She thinks they are critiqued unfairly. But I think she isn't reading JI Packer and the couple of generations of Reformed Evangelicals since then that have rediscovered them. There are reasons that Puritans should be critiqued, not unfairly, because there is reasons to listen to them as well. But she is not balanced here. Many abolitionists may have come from Puritan backgrounds, but may others from Puritan backgrounds were happy to make money from slavery or banking or shipping that was significantly influenced by slavery. And once slavery was over was happy to deny full inclusion of African Americans within Northeastern society. It isn't unfair to the Puritans to grapple with how their pietism was not sufficient to communicate their faith to their children and grandchildren well. Or how they did not not live up to their ideals well.
There is also a lot of repetition here. Same quotes and same ideas in different essays. There could have been better editing or development of the ideas in a ways that had less repetition.
I think this is a case where the book is less than the individual essays. Many of the essays are good. But as a collection they are weak. She is, as an essayist, fairly unpersuasive and I am inclined to agree with her before I started reading. So I am at roughly the same place I was after the last book of essays. I will read any of her novels, but I probably won't read any more of her essays. d
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/what-are-we-doing-here/
