Dear Friends,

We are so pleased to be back, to continue our conversation with the ninth issue of Fare Forward. We’ve enjoyed interacting with some of you already through our weekly newsletter, where you’ll find our book reviews, supplemented by these quarterly, subscriber-only collections of essays and poetry.

This issue is a Festschrift for Marilynne Robinson—a celebration of her work up to the present day, and particularly of the release of her newest novel, Jack. This celebration is by no means comprehensive, but we hope it will give you an idea of the variety of subjects and concerns to which Robinson has turned her pen.

Allen Reynolds uses both Gilead and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as inspiration for a letter written to his own unborn son. Alex Engebretson, meanwhile, has written a challenge to the critics of Robinson’s Gilead novels, suggesting that reading her stories can be a formational, even catechizing, experience. You can read Charlie Clark’s review of Jack in this week’s newsletter. Drawing on Robinson’s nonfiction, both Justin Hawkins and Rebecca Lewis engage with Robinson’s live belief in democracy and in the American project.

Personally, I came to Robinson’s books somewhat late in life. No matter how many times I read them, there are passages in her novels that never fail to move me to tears. It is, above all, her attention—to the world, to her characters, even to people long dead—that arrests and inspires me. As Simone Weil said, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Robinson’s generosity extends to all the world—as she wrote in Gilead, “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention we can give it.” Her attention to what it means to be human, to what it means to live on this marvelous planet, deserves our attention in return.

Finally, we are deeply grateful to Marilynne Robinson for granting us an interview. We hope you’ll find her thoughts on the existence of evil, the future of the American project, and the heroes we can look to today as fascinating as we did.

Thank you for joining us. We’d love to know what you think.

Fare forward, travelers,

Sarah Clark

Editor-in-Chief, Fare Forward