Feminist and Religious Themes
The Meri series revolves around the period of transition among the people who live on a peninsula. The chapters are headed with quotes from scripture presented as those of the religion of the people but many are in fact quotes from Bahá'í scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada and other Buddhist sacred texts, the Qur'an and the Bible. The first and second book also carry an acknowledgement of Bahá'u'lláh, a Local Spiritual Assembly and Bahá'í community. The plot involves a progression on the understanding of a people in relation to the role and position of women. Unknown to the people of the story, women have always been instrumental to their religion as agents of God and a chosen few have always acted as the personification of the Spirit of God, or "Meri". The first book focuses on a young girl destined to take on that role. While similar to other stories of the triumph of women it has several unique qualities most particularly a central male character being her benefactor and teacher and not an obstacle she has to overcome. The second book focuses on the return of the prior "Meri" who takes it as her mission as the head of the renewed religion to promulgate the new paradigm of the role of women. The third book focuses on her transition to being a head of state but wrestling with several of the same issues from among as well as beyond her people. Another novel she has written called The Spirit Gate has many of the same features but is written in a different context — a fantasy work set in a historical time and place of roughly AD 1000 in the area today of Poland and Ukraine where two forms of Christianity (Eastern Orthodox and Catholic) and Islam met the pagan older religion. Bahá’í themes, especially in the respect granted other religions, are largely identified with the older religion. Several of these themes are also in Bohnhoff's shorter writings — "Infinite Sky, Infinite God" highlights a Catholic future. Several short stories center on women — like "The Doctor's Wife" and "The White Dog" and both have reference to a religion. Reprints of some of Bohnhoff's works containing references to Baha'i themes are collected in the Juxta Press release, _I Loved Thy Creation_.
Read more about this topic: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Writings
Famous quotes containing the words feminist and, feminist, religious and/or themes:
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency—indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman—but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“... religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)