“The Anger of Marilynne Robinson,” Fare Forward (September 2020)

I'm pleased to have a new piece on Marilynne Robinson's first nonfiction book, Mother Country, in the newly-revived Fare Forward journal. It is behind a paywall and requires a subscription, but you should consider subscribing to support its vision of publishing excellent Christian thinking by emerging and established writers.

The Americans for whom Robinson wrote Mother Country have likely never heard of Sellafield. But they have heard of Chernobyl. When I visited the Ukraine at the age of fifteen, the 1986 accident at Chernobyl was sufficiently distant to be a punch line among the Ukrainians: “How do you know the directions to Chernobyl? Just drive north until your skin starts to glow.” “I can count on my fingers the number of times I have visited Chernobyl: thirteen.” But a punchline for the Ukrainians was a boon for Sellafield, because the meltdown at Chernobyl drew attention away from earlier, less catastrophic, nuclear power plant accidents. When Chernobyl became the worst nuclear accident in history, it took that title away from the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Great Britain. Windscale has since been renamed Sellafield. But nobody’s skin glowed at Windscale.

You can read the rest here.