Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead. In this essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display. A call for Americans to continue the tradition of those great thinkers and to remake political and cultural life as "deeply impressed by obligation [and as] a great theater of heroic generosity, which, despite all, is sometimes palpable still. Marilynne Robinson was the winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Gilead. Her nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death of Adam, and Mother Country. She lives in Iowa.