Gilead Themes

What happens to relationships when we don't forgive? Marilynne Robinson is all about asking that question in Gilead. John Ames, an old preacher about to buy the farm, writes to his son to confess h...

John Ames has almost always lived in Gilead. His father, mother, and brother left long ago, but he stayed. For him, Gilead is home, and home can be nowhere else. Ames's home is not wherever he is o...

All you need is love, folks. In Gilead, John Ames believes in love like he believes in God. They're not the far apart, actually. For Ames, to love another person is to share in God's love—an unco...

It's tough to keep a family together. Gilead features three families facing especially difficult times: the head of the Ames family is slowly dying; the Boughtons have a prodigal son; and Jack Boug...

Throughout history, people have turned to Christian theology to both justify and reject war. In Gilead, these two poles are front and center: Ames's grandfather supports war, while Ames's father i...

Some people like to say, "I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious." Well, many of the characters in Gilead might say something a little different: "I'm spiritual, and I'm religious." The people of Gil...

The religion we see in Gilead isn't about sin, but sin sure does haunt the novel.John Ames is a Christian preacher in a small-town church. You'd expect him to discuss sin, and he does, but it's not...

Gilead is something of a miracle: a successful novel that is also a successful work about spirituality. It's tough to pull that off—spiritual reflections can easily distract from plot, or they ca...

One of the big questions facing John Ames in Gilead is how to convey a life's worth of experience and wisdom to somehow he loves and will soon have to leave.Ames is an old man with a bad heart writ...

Everything ends, but there's beauty to mortality if you're willing to accept it. At least that's what John Ames comes to realize in Gilead. The novel is a letter of love from an aging, dying father...