Early into Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila (2014), the eponymous heroine arrives in the Iowa town of Gilead and takes shelter from the rain in its church. That is where she meets the kindly minister, her husband-to-be, John Ames. “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do,” she tells him. “I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life” is his succinct reply.

Such weighty questions and such dedicated wondering permeate and inform all four of Robinson’s Bible-steeped novels. In her theologically influenced essays she has more freedom and is able to dispense with the baggage and the trappings of fiction—plot development, character studies, style, and imagery—and cut straight to the spiritual inquiry, tackling head-on Lila’s quandaries “about existence, about the great storms that rise in it.” In Robinson’s new essay collection, The Givenness of Things, she makes her position clear from the outset: “I am a theist,” she declares. Later in the book she adds other, less rigid titles: “I am sometimes a writer and sometimes a scholar.” As an essayist she is all three. What she is not is a controversialist, which in this day and age is old-fashioned but also original. Instead of shouty polemics, Robinson gives us calm discourses, each one born of deep, considered reasoning. “I want to speculate,” she writes in one essay, “to ponder, to propose other ways of thinking.” Those who approach these writings with an open mind, and who choose to accommodate