God's Glory (Home pp. 1-105)

First of all, let me offer an apology for taking so long to post this. I last posted on Monday, November 10, and since then three things have kept me busy. First, I helped run a great conference at Villanova University (where I also gave a paper). Second, my first quarter teaching at DePaul University ended. And third, I’ve just finished the grading for my classes. Thus, my schedule for posting had to change, and I’m sorry to those who have begun Home and have been waiting for me to write about it here.

There is something fitting for me to write about Home as my first quarter at DePaul ends. In May 2009, I was finishing up my first year of teaching at Villanova University. There I taught the Augustine and Culture Seminar, a two-term “great books” course for first-year students. Many of the books the students and I read that year — The Odyssey, Genesis, The Tempest— had to do with coming home or finding a new home. I thought this was a fitting topic for first-year students, and so we ended the second term by reading and discussing Robinson’s novel. I’m sorry to say that my (many and various) teaching missteps stick with me far more than my (relatively few) teaching triumphs, and I fear that I didn’t do a good job teaching Home. Part of the problem was that even though Robinson was one of the two living authors we read that year, Glory Boughton seemed the most foreign character my students encountered. After a year reading about Odysseus and Abraham and Jesus and Augustine and Dante and Prospero as well as Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith and Nietzsche’s Superman, here was a protagonist who didn’t seem to do anything. Here’s a book where not much happened.

Home is a story about family, which is to say a story about ordinary things: preparing meals and doing work around the yard; sibling rivalry; intergenerational misunderstanding; and most importantly love and indifference and the very difficult work of forgiveness. In his review of Robinson’s work, Anthony Domestico puts this particularly well,