Our Sterile Academic Theology

“I think it is part of our endless colonial mindset that we wait for ideas, especially about philosophy and theology, to come from Europe,” says Marilynne Robinson, interviewed by the Jewish Daily Forward.

Then when they arrive they are not quite assimilable to our own assumptions and values — though this is never acknowledged. People try to adapt to them, which suppresses original thought, and then a new idea drifts in, the older one is half-abandoned, and on it goes. We are a very religious culture with a fundamentally sterile academic theology. The intellectual fads we generate here are usually cranky objections to the fact that the Bible is not agreeable in every detail to our wildly untypical lives — that it is sometimes better suited to the experience of the many hundred generations who have lived and died before us.