A badger cannot understand differential equations, but that tells us something about badgers, not equations.” It is refreshing to discover a poet critically concerned with God, and to do so with humor. For Robbins, the “incoherence” of naturalism “is the external warrant for my belief in God.” His one criticism of Hart is the theologian’s dismissal of the “possibility that our bafflement before ontological mystery is the result of our being the kind of limited animals we are. At the same time, he says “showing up American fundamentalism is about as hard as shooting the deck of an aircraft carrier when you’re standing on it.” His problem, of course, is with literalism: the Word made flat.Ĭritic Matthew Sitman has recently called Christian Wiman the “most important Christian writer in America.” Robbins, then, might be the most provocative Christian writer in America. In a review of theologian David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, Robbins punctures the silkscreened divinity portrayed by the New Atheists (they “ingeniously deny the existence of a bearded fellow with superpowers who lives in the sky and finds people’s keys for them”). Predator, set the mold for his poetic play, but I think Robbins’s center might reside in his criticism.
He rather reminds me of that whiskey priest, his lines by turns abrasive and aphoristic, but never apathetic. The New Republic calls Robbins a prankster. Michael Robbins is our contemporary poet laureate for beautiful sins of language. He tells the woman to not believe that, “Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty.” A “pious” woman, jailed for having religious books, calls the copulating pair “brutes” and “animals.” She hates their “ugliness.” The whiskey priest knows better. In one scene, the priest has been jailed for possessing brandy, and shares a dark cell with others, including a couple having sex. He dramatized the obscenities of a Mexican whiskey priest hunted by Tomás Garrido Canabal’s Red Shirts in The Power and the Glory. To say that Greene was a troubled Catholic would be the same as calling him a Catholic at all. Thomas the doubter and not Thomas Aquinas.” He found God, but hadn’t lost his wit. Greene was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1926, and announced the conversion to his mother by writing “I expect you have guessed that I am embracing the Scarlet Woman.” He later identified as a “Catholic agnostic,” which complemented his baptismal name of Thomas, “after St. Piety and profanity both require devotion.
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