Gilead

This book goes a long way in offering an apologia for Calvinism and a deeper understanding of Calvinism and its implications. It is probably the romanticism in me that reacts against the stark realism of Calvinism--the sense that not everything is going to be alright and that we've got to live with that. The book portrays the truth that the love of a parent is deep and can forgive without limits, but that it cannot understand and comprehend everything that it's asked to. The relationship between a father and a son (and various levels of fathers and sons, and spiritual fathers and sons) serves as a metaphor for our relationship to the divine, which Marilyn Robinson sees as an aesthetic relationship (to which she is true by arguing for the aesthetic in the form of a novel). The last section of the book, in particular, stands out as a masterful and artistic representation of theological truths.