Reading the Bible at University of Iowa

In August 2002, Aviya Kushner left Jerusalem, where she had been a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, returned to her parents’ home in Monsey, New York, and then drove a thousand miles west to Iowa City to begin an MFA program in nonfiction writing. She left with just one name in her pocket: Marilynne Robinson. The essayist and novelist usually taught classes on 19th-century literature, and in her first year Kushner took one. But in Kushner’s second year, Robinson chose to devote both semesters to teaching the Bible. Kushner took the class, and it changed the course of both her literary and spiritual lives.