Loren Woodson

Loren Woodson


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Loren Woodson is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst long fascinated with the intersection of the psychological, the religious, and the spiritual. Over many years, he has re-apprenticed himself to the fiction-writing crafts, a period that has yielded two screenplays and another novel.

The Passion of Maryam

Loren Woodson
Plain View Press (2007)
ISBN 1891386743
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (3/07)

Synopsis: "The Passion of Maryam" is a dramatic reconsideration of the Virgin Mother, in a meditation on good, evil, and the divine. What might she really have been like? What might her relationship have been with her charismatic son and with God? While Mary and Jesus—Maryam and Yeshua—are usually pictured as embodying unsullied good, what if it had been the case that both, from the beginning, had been forced to seek the holy from an abyss of evil? Would that not reveal a particular depth and reach to their unique lives? The novel finds within the iconic Virgin a pious Galilean young woman who suffers a profound violation that plunges her into doubt about her faith and beliefs in the God of Israel. She endures to become a wife and mother, who struggles with her entrancing and enigmatic firstborn. Their interaction at his cruel execution shines light into the shadowed layers of their relationship with each other and with the Holy One, God of Israel, and climaxes her struggle to turn unfathomable evil into the transcendent mystery of the divine.

The novel is the product of seven years of research, consultation with numerous Biblical sources and scholars, the study of Hebrew and Greek, and site visits in the Holy Land. The manuscript has been read in ongoing stages by several biblical scholars to ensure historical accuracy and plausibility.