Symposium on Local Bahá’í History

The Nashville Bahá’í Community: A Legacy of Unity

Slide Show: The Nashville Bahá’í Community: A Legacy of Unity (PDF)

We’ll take a brief look at the Bahá’í community of Nashville Tennessee, focusing on its formative years and its legacy of race unity.

Moments in Bahá’í History of Lansing, MI

Slide Show: Moments in History of Bahá’í Faith in Lansing, Michigan (PDF)

This presentation will cover the moments of Bahá’í History found through Archival documents, letters, and photos in Archives and Newspapers. Some personal accounts are included.

The Oklahoma Bahá’í Oral History Project

Slide Show: The Oklahoma Bahá’í Oral History Project (PDF)

The Oklahoma Bahá’í Oral History Project began in 2004 as a collaborative initiative of Mark Vaccaro and Alex Resnick. Its purpose is to record on video the stories of service of Bahá’ís who currently live in Oklahoma or who previously lived in Oklahoma. This presentation explores the origins of the project and the techniques that were developed to interview the Bahá’ís, record the videos, edit them and present them in an acceptable format to the National Bahá’í Archives for the benefit of future Bahá’í historians. The focus of the presentation is not on the actual history of the Bahá’í Faith in Oklahoma. Rather it is on how we do what we do so that others will see how relatively easy it is to do the same thing to document the growth and development of the Faith in their own communities.

The Sacred Feminine at the Heart of the Bahá’í Faith: An Indigenous Feminine Perspective

This multimedia presentation augmented with visual art images will be an introduction to the Feminine Divine of Native America including Earth Mother as Corn Mother Selu, Tonantzin as Eagle Woman, the Aztec Virgin Mother named Guadalupe and others within the context of an Indigenous world view where Mother Nature and Creator are the same.

Contributors

Ptehíŋčala Ska Wiŋ (White Buffalo Calf Woman) Divine Messenger to the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (People of the Seven Council Fires)

Kevin Locke, MEd

I have had a lifelong drive to explore and create. In 1972 Richard Fool Bull the foremost exemplar and practitioner of the Indigenous North American flute urged me to take up and perpetuate this unique and precious heritage that has evolved and developed here in this continent from time immemorial. It was through him and many other elders that I caught a glimpse of the dreams, hopes and visions that have propelled our ancestors. Those elders have departed but their spirit lives through the traditions they have passed on to us and comes alive when we actively engage younger generations in their perpetuation. We can realize the fulfillment of those dreams on their behalf. When I first started with the flute I wanted to develop a repertoire. Fortunately when I started in the mid 1970’s many of the older generation had a great knowledge of the unique vocal genre from which the flute melodies are derived and I was able to obtain a vast reservoir of this special genre. The current popularized “Native American flute” was invented in 1980 for commercial purposes in that it uses the well-known “melodic” or minor pentatonic scale and lends itself to improvisation. I differentiate that from the original Indigenous North American flute, which is much more versatile and has a wider range of notes and is perfectly adapted to play not only chromatic, diatonic and pentatonic scales but its note progression is able to capture the authentic Indigenous North American musical esthetic.

Navigating the Urgent Transition Toward Sustainability

Responding to Injustice with Constructive Agency

Intro to book chapter: “The past century has given rise to a searching global conversation regarding nonviolent approaches to social change. Bahá’ís are increasingly contributing to this conversation in ways that draw on an accumulating body of experience. In this regard, the Bahá’í community comprises a growing movement of people across the planet, representing a microcosm of humanity, working to translate commonly held spiritual principles into a new social reality through an evolving framework of action. This chapter examines salient elements of this framework in relation to insights from the theory and practice of nonviolent social change. It begins by considering how Bahá’ís understand the root causes of oppression. The dual problems of complacency and contentiousness in the face of oppression are then discussed, followed by an examination of the constructive and resilient means by which Bahá’ís work for social transformation and justice. The chapter concludes by examining those means through the lens of movement building.”

From “Responding to Injustice with Constructive Agency” by Michael Karlberg and Derik Smith, published in The World of the Bahá’í Faith, Robert Stockman (ed.) London: Routledge, 2022.

Symposium: Studies in Bahá’í Epistemology

In Modern times and, more specifically, since the appearance in 1781 of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, epistemological issues acquired a special significance in philosophical studies. With the rise of Biblical criticism, Christian scriptural philosophy had lost its momentum, and nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers focused on sense perception and reason as the two primary sources of human cognition.

A recently conceived and developed religious movement, the Bahá’í faith reintroduces the scriptural mode of thinking into philosophical inquiries. Its scriptural texts are well preserved and authenticated. Many of the writings by the founding figures of the faith explicitly address critical philosophical problems. They also employ the Aristotelian technical vocabulary with occasional addition of neo-Platonic terms.

In the West, epistemological studies from a Bahá’í perspective started in 1978 with the publication of Jack McLean’s essay “The Knowledge of God: An Essay on Bahá’í Epistemology.” Since then, Bahá’í thinkers have addressed different aspects of epistemological research. More specifically, in this program the participants will discuss the independent search for truth, the standards of knowledge, the problems of certainty and relativity, infallibility, and interpretation, as well as mystical experience. All those topics were explored in-depth in the book Studies in Bahá’í Epistemology, which is forthcoming this year in the Boston publishing company M-Graphics.

God Tests the Sincerity of an Emperor: Bahá’u’lláh’s first Tablet to Napoleon III

This webinar will be the first of four webinars for the course: God Summons Europe (Part I).

The first full English translation of Bahá’u’lláh’s first Tablet to Napoleon III.

I am an independent scholar of the Bahá’í history and sacred scripture. I began my scholarly endeavours in Bahá’í history around 1989, after I completed my undergraduate degree in Applied Physics and Electro-Acoustics with a minor in Religious Studies and Middle Eastern History. Two years later in 1991, I was invited to present at the annual conference of the Association for Bahá’í Studies North America on one of Bahá’u’lláh major works. Since then I have been involved with Bahá’í academic research as well as the work of translating into English the writings of the Central Figures of the Bahá’í Faith. I am a published author and lecturer whose writings and presentations focus on Bahá’í Sacred Text and their literary and historical significance in the context of socio-spiritual condition of human society. I have authored more than couple of dozen articles on Bahá’í history and Sacred Text as well as a monograph on Bahá’u’lláh entitled “Bahá’u’lláh: A Brief Survey of His Life & Works”

Ideas, Approaches, and Social Change: Emerging insights from the Bahá’í Community's 75-year engagement with the United Nations

In her talk, Dr. Berger traces the experience of a community whose ideas about social order and the mechanisms of social change are refashioning familiar notions of politics as well as religion. Focusing on the Bahá’í International Community (BIC), an international non-governmental organization (NGO) which represents the worldwide Bahá’í community in global fora—most notably, at the United Nations.

Dr. Berger explores a unique and timely example of an approach to social change that goes beyond the divisive, antagonistic modes that tend to characterize political processes–one that lays the foundations for new patterns of relationships among individuals, communities, and governing institutions—patterns attuned to the needs of an evolving, interdependent global community. The lecture focuses on several elements of a framework that shapes the Bahá’í approach to politics, including a developmental view of history, and the principle of the oneness of humanity, and further, examines the role of the Administrative Order in shaping the BIC’s engagement with the international community.

The lecture outlines an effort, echoed in wider scholarship, to enlarge the moral imagination about the vision, values, structures, and protagonists needed to forge a social order to meet the needs of the age in which we live.

Part 2

This two-part webinar series will take the participant back to Haifa on two auspicious moments one hundred years ago: the night of the Ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, and the day in which the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was read publicly.

This webinar will take the participant back to Haifa on the night of the Ascension of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, one hundred years ago, through the eye-witness accounts of the six Western believers who were present at that time. The webinar will include the story of who these believers were, what brought them to Haifa at that time, and how were their lives were changed by the experience.