Fans of Robinson’s Pulitzer winning Gilead and other novels can gather insights into her philosophical and religious beliefs in these 17 essays. She takes her title from a chapter exploring the work of the 18th Century Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards – he is a pragmatist, she writes, because “he has a very active sense of the givenness of things”. She laments the neuroscientific reduction of the mystery of the self to “the firing of certain synapses in the brain”, and the contemporary emphasis on technology and the material world. She discusses her own faith, developed through a journey that includes scholarship and listening to thousands of sermons as a churchgoer. Delving into the Bible, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer and Shakespeare, among others, she articulates the devout but humanist vision that is the wellspring of her fiction. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)