What are we doing here? Some of us ask ourselves that existential question several times a day. Marilynne Robinson, armed with a ferocious intellect, theological scholarship and forensic arguments, provides not just one answer, but many propositions, suggestions and unsettling certainties. These 15 essays, written between 2015 and 2017, with two of the finest undated, are all based on lectures or sermons, delivered to various institutions, churches and universities.  This is occasional writing: the essay in its nineteenth-century mould, erudite and complex, but unencumbered with footnotes, or the usual academic scholarly apparatus and bibliography. This is sometimes frustrating.