Gilead
In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always and inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding existence, which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to hve any meaning, however.
I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether – if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There is a problem in vocabulary…
From Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, p 203
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
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I actually cried when I heard the news of her death. Apart from her wonderful poetry, she also said nice things on Poetry Please about my women’s poetry anthology Faith in her Words (which of course included some Fanthorpe).
And although UA should have been the poet laureate, I note that finally a woman has been chosen (after 341 years)…also one with a sharpe sense of humour… Carol Ann Duffy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/world/europe/02poet.html
Oh..I had missed that she was gone. Wonderful woman…wonderful poetry.
“Right” said the baby “that was roughly what we had in mind”