Really, Really Pretending: Bowling Green

Really, Really Pretending: Bowling Green

February 6, 2017February 7, 2017 MayaMashed Potatoes

There is a Baha’i prayer that invokes aid from God ”to refute what is vain and false.” Since Baha’is are also not to participate in partisan politics, finding a balance between these two mandates can be difficult. This is my attempt to apply the spirit[…]

News, Fluff and Damn Fluff

January 27, 2017 MayaMashed Potatoes

I use a news aggregator to ping me with breaking news stories. My sources run the gamut from NPR to Fox to CNN to the AP News to The Guardian to DailyMail to Breitbart to Vox. Obviously of these media outlets, NPR, Fox, Associated Press,[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – Six

December 6, 2016December 6, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

The following is the entirety of Part IV of The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue. The responsibility for the achievement of racial peace and unity in the United States rests upon both Black and White Americans. To build a society in which[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – Five

November 17, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

A frequent refrain in media, in social networking memes and posts, in political rhetoric and in classrooms is that the United States is the greatest nation on Earth. It has also been called a grand experiment and a melting pot. It is exactly that peculiar[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – Four

November 10, 2016November 17, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

This is the fourth in a series of essays that use, as their centerpiece, the statement on race unity released some years ago by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States: The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue. The quoted segment[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – Three

November 4, 2016November 10, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

In the last two paragraphs of Part I its statement The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States writes: For too much of its history and in so many places the human race has[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – Two

October 31, 2016November 10, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

The following is from the statement “The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue”, published by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of the United States. This is the national guiding body for the Baha’is of the continental US (Alaska and Hawaii have[…]

Our Most Challenging Issue – One

October 28, 2016November 10, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

This is the first of a series on the issue of race unity, in which I’d like to share some thoughts on a facet of our national life that is yet a source of social disintegration. Obviously, only we, as individuals and members of intersecting[…]

Well-Informed Electorate Take Two

October 14, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

I’d like to talk about elections. No, not the mind-numbing chaos of the current presidential elections—which will no doubt affect the congressional elections to come, and traumatize anyone old enough to grasp what’s going on. I’d like to talk about an election that my husband[…]

A Well-Informed Electorate?

September 23, 2016September 23, 2016 MayaMashed Potatoes

Anyone who knows me knows that journalistic integrity and accurate communication is an obsession of mine. Especially in complex situations where the simplicity of soundbites contributes much to the functional illiteracy of our society. In that spirit, I’d like to remind folks of something that happened[…]

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

"… fiction is an attempt to make reality behave by pretending to look the other way." — Ray Bradbury

Category: Mashed Potatoes