I’m picking my way through Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays, What Are We Doing Here? I love Robinson’s fiction and am enlightened by her nonfiction. But I have to read the latter carefully, and more than once, so dense is the prose, so tightly packed are the ideas it holds.

The extra time is never wasted, as her ideas are countercultural in the best sense of that word. Robinson writes about humanism and religion — and she writes unapologetically. Most of our great institutions grew out of our theology, which she defines as “the great architecture of thought and wonder that makes religious experience a house of many mansions, open to the soul’s explorations.”

Robinson does not shy away from delivering charges. Here’s an example: “One thing theology must do now is to reconsider and reject the kind of thinking that tends to devalue humankind.”

To read Robinson is to be reminded of a world richer and fuller than the one we inhabit now, one where what she calls the “moral self, that old wanderer through the trials and temptations of earthly life,” was freer to roam and risk and challenge and live.