“People always ask me if I’m talking about the same thing again,” novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson told a crowded lecture hall at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2011. “The same thing” being French Protestant theologian John Calvin and his influence on American history. “And the honest answer would almost always be ‘yes.’” Her lecture that day was titled “The Freedom of a Christian,” and it traced an idea of freedom to the New England Puritans, the theology of Calvin, and back all the way to the Old Testament. “Freedom,” in the language of these foundational texts, “is something we give to one another, rather than something we claim for ourselves,” she explained.
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