Literature – Page 3 – Feminism and Religion

Lessons from Candide by Barbara Ardinger

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (in English, Candide, or Optimism) is a satirical, picaresque novel published in 1759 by François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, who was possibly the smartest author of the Age of Enlightenment…but he annoyed so many courtiers and public officials that he was forever traveling around Europe to get away from their threats of arrest and bodily harm. A picaresque novel is an adventure novel with a clever, tricky hero who somehow survives and makes us like him. Voltaire wrote his novel primarily to criticize the optimism of the German writer Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who said that because God is always benevolent, everything that happens is always for the best. This presumably includes the bloody Seven Years War (Protestant vs. Catholic, fought mostly in Germany and France) and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which occurs both in Lisbon and in the novel. Even though Voltaire was accused of blasphemy and heresy, among his other sins and crimes, Candide was enormously popular throughout Europe, a popularity that continues to this day.

In 1956, playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman (who had been persecuted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and HUAC) proposed to composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein that they turn Voltaire’s novel into a Broadway musical. Bernstein composed some of the most beautiful music ever written for this show, which has been produced as an opera, an operetta, and a musical comedy. Hellman’s libretto turned out to be weak, so Bernstein turned to the poet Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim, among others for new libretto and lyrics. It’s been through numerous revisions, and every time it’s staged, it’s different. I have four or five versions on DVD. My favorite is the New York Philharmonic staged concert written and directed by Lonny Price and broadcast on PBS in 2004. Continue reading “Lessons from Candide by Barbara Ardinger”

A Rescue Remedy, Part 2 by Barbara Ardinger

The handsome but uncharming prince having been magicked, the witch and her coconspirators know it’s time to focus on finding Ella. The witch looks around the table.

“Mrs. Janedoe and Mrs. Worthington,” she says, “you are two of our most highly experienced sauceresses…I mean sorceresses. Mrs. Bezukhov, you are also a woman of great, if temporarily diminished, power. Let us work together and see what we can do. Surely when people of good will work together they can raise energy that leads to positive results. Yes?” She looks around. “Please come up to my study.” The ravens of course know they are members of this ad hoc coven, and Mrs. Bezukhov goes out to her little room (actually a stall) in the barn to fetch her old scrying stone.

“Now,” says the witch, “we need to find out where Ella is and—”

“Before that,” says Kahlil, the prophetic raven, “we gotta fly that…er…sausage to the city ’n’ drop it on that lousy prince and hit ’im where it’ll do the most good. Make sure he got the message, doncha know. I got a new buddy who’ll fly with us.” He waves a wing at the window and another raven flies in. “This’s Icarus.” The new raven bows. “Despite his name, he’s a good flyer ’n’ he knows the safest routes to the capital and the bestest ways to get around the city.” Kahlil shows the bagged sausage to Icarus, who studies it and shakes his head like he’s just been attacked by a million fleas. “Okay,” says Kahlil, “youse girls just keep an eye on us in that there scrying stone.” He starts to rise from the table, but Mrs. Worthington stops him.

Continue reading “A Rescue Remedy, Part 2 by Barbara Ardinger”

A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger

A year, now. It has been a full year since the phony election that put El Presidente in the Golden Office. A year since people began leaving the capital and the nation’s other large cities. While some of the refugees emigrated to quasi-democratic nations, most of them settled in the small towns and on the farms across the countryside, where they began building new, rural lives. A year ago, it was a flood of refugees. Now fewer people are able to escape.

A year, now, and even though she has studied and practiced, the wicked witch is no wickeder than she ever was. Nowadays she even forgets to put on the wicked-witch mask that she used to think scared people. But it’s easy for everyone to see that, masked or not, she’s just an ordinary woman practicing an old-time religion. She’s never fooled anyone, not the sixty or so refugees who now live on her farm, especially not the various ravens who drop by regularly for snacks in exchange for gossip.

Continue reading “A Rescue Remedy, Part I by Barbara Ardinger”

Religious Studies is Too [?] for Education by Elisabeth Schilling

Since I am teaching in a charter high school this year, this is the level of education I am speaking about. I teach college English, and often craft my writing classes in thematic ways. This semester, I did units on mindfulness and the environment. Some of my younger students were resistant to the texts that were Buddhist in tradition, and when I suggested, perhaps to take a more comparative and inclusive approach, we actually do a world religions unit for my classes next semester, the administration was very kind and supportive, yet hesitant due to the “conservative” nature of our institution. I am grateful that the administration is willing to work with me and possibly allow me to do the unit next academic year with some guidance and advisement. But, again on the younger student level, I hear “This is an English class and not a Religious Studies class” or even the question, “Can we study religion in school?”

I myself have had a mottled relationship with religion, having been introduced at a young age to an intensive, evangelistic, charismatic version of Christianity that consumed my formative years. The incredible communal space created by this version applied extreme language to relationships with others and ourselves in terms of those who followed other religions or none at all (they were confounded by that tricky devil), in terms of those who were not straight (sin is sin), and in terms of our young bodies, since self-pleasure was cheating on our future (different-sexed) spouse. Continue reading “Religious Studies is Too [?] for Education by Elisabeth Schilling”

My Connection to Bengali Vaishnavism by Nazia Islam

Last summer I began a deep inquiry of Gaudiya/Bengali Vaishnava culture. That inquiry had its origins in a dream I had two years prior where Radha and Krishna appeared in the form of miniature clay figurines. Krishna went missing and Radha asked me to help find him like how she implores her sakhis/friends in much Vaishnava literature. Seeing deities in that manner, as I know in some aspects of Bengali culture, is a big deal. It usually signifies some spiritual connection to those deities. I wrote the dream down because of how vividly I saw it but brushed off as anything significant to me personally though the dream sparked my inquiry.

I had gotten some great information from an academic I met at the American Academy of Religion conference in 2015 who recommended I start with an ethnographic study, The Place of Devotion (Open source by UC Press), published that year by scholar Sukanya Sarbadhikary on the diversity of Bengali Vaishnavism. That was my start of my spiritual-academic journey of understanding Bengali Vaishnavism, but it has taken a while for me, through a lot of counseling, to get mentally and emotionally stable before I could start processing and analyzing all the information I’ve been collecting on this topic. I’m not going to divulge on the details about this in depth, but I can say it is connected to the politics of religious purity found across South Asian Muslim and Hindu communities which is exacerbated by non-Muslims and Hindus who can’t comprehend, for lack of a better word, folk religion or religious syncretism apart from the framework of dual religious identity through intermarriages and the term “multiple religious belonging.” But even those terms are not readily ascribed to non-white bodies.

Continue reading “My Connection to Bengali Vaishnavism by Nazia Islam”

What I Believe (Post-2016) by John Erickson

Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing.

Ever since the election of You-Know-Who, I have been doing a lot of creative writing. Unlike academic publications, policy reports, or my dissertation, creative writing, much like my mentor Dr. Marie Cartier has written about, provided me with a needed escape from a world that seems to grow darker with each passing day. In college, I served as Poetry Editor for the Wisconsin Review, the oldest literary journal in Wisconsin. Continue reading “What I Believe (Post-2016) by John Erickson”

David’s Loves, Jonathan’s Laments by Dirk von der Horst

LGBTQ+ people in biblical religions often turn to the story of Jonathan’s love for David as an example of biblical affirmation of same-sex love. The biblical narrative in 1 and 2 Samuel stresses Jonathan’s love for David from the moment David and Jonathan meet to Jonathan’s death after which David utters the famous words, “your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Nevertheless, “love” can indicate many different kinds of relationship, both sexual and non-sexual, and one finds much resistance among biblical scholars to reading Jonathan and David as a model of sexually-expressed love between men. While some passages in the text are sexually suggestive, nothing in the Bible explicitly states, “David and Jonathan had sex.” Thus, the strategy of holding up Jonathan and David as a biblical vindication of same-sex love and desire only throws LGBTQ+ people back into the exhausting state of being endlessly debated.

My new book, David’s Loves, Jonathan’s Laments: Gay Theology, Musical Desires, and Historical Difference speaks from the pain of the experience of being caught in the crosshairs of that debate. Inspired in large part by Mary Daly, it also speaks from an impatience with the state of being stuck in a debate that endlessly repeats itself. This inspiration from Daly is only one way in which feminist thought deeply informs my project of rethinking the relationship of Jonathan and David.

Continue reading “David’s Loves, Jonathan’s Laments by Dirk von der Horst”

Shakespeare’s Sister Revisited: A Circle of Female Lineage by Mary Sharratt

Vanessa Bell’s painting of her sister, Virginia Woolf

What do groundbreaking 17th century poet, Aemilia Bassano Lanier, and 20th century feminist icon, Virginia Woolf, have in common? A lot actually.

In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf imagines the tragedy of Shakespeare’s brilliant sister, Judith, barred from the grammar school because of her sex and forced to hide her writing from her family. To escape a forced marriage to a man she hates, she runs away to London to seek her fortune in the theatre, only to end up pregnant, abandoned, and destitute. Out of despair, she kills herself. Continue reading “Shakespeare’s Sister Revisited: A Circle of Female Lineage by Mary Sharratt”

The Last Man on Earth, Noah, and the Fantasy of Humanity’s Destruction by Elisabeth Schilling

blue fleur There are quite a few post-apocalyptic shows out these days. The Last Man on Earth is one example, a television series that is set in 2020, a year after a deadly virus has wiped (almost) everyone out. A handful of people have natural immunity, which the main character, Phil (Will Forte) soon discovers after spray painting billboards across the U.S. with the message “Alive in Tuscon.” It seems to be a lonely life for Phil before he realizes he isn’t really the only person left alive, but he can choose any mansion to live in, drive any car on the empty, open roads, and the grocery stores are abandoned for his taking (only non-perishables are really edible though). There are downsides such as no electricity, no running water, and an end to all of the other modern-day conveniences that an urbanite would be used to, which were, in the past, handled by “someone else.” It would be much better if a farmer or botanist were left behind, but I guess it is supposed to be relatable to most of us.

Watching this show has compelled me to think about other apocalypses in sacred literature, mainly Noah and the global flood. I always have thought it was rather chilling that gods were created to be such harsh punishers of humankind. In the Qur’an, this story is used as one of many examples of the communities that were sent a messenger but disobeyed and so endured the promised wipe-out. It always seemed strange to me that God would be discussed to be so violent when the immediate messages in these literatures were that human beings should be kind, charitable, and moderate with each other. Continue reading “The Last Man on Earth, Noah, and the Fantasy of Humanity’s Destruction by Elisabeth Schilling”

Part Three: Magic, Destiny, and Acceptance by Anjeanette LeBoeuf

Anjeanette The last young adult fantasy book series I will be looking at is Sarah Maas’s Throne of Glass. Sarah Maas’s Throne of Glass is a combination of all the elements which we have looked at in the previous two series, Girl of Fire and Thrones and Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Throne of Glass was originally conceived of as a remake of Cinderella but mingled with action. It is so much more than, weaving fantasy with gripping action, hard emotions, and love stories to revel any romance novel. And like the previous two series, it has been picked up to be turned into a TV series. Continue reading “Part Three: Magic, Destiny, and Acceptance by Anjeanette LeBoeuf”