Category Archives: Baha'i

Utilitarianism (and the Baha’i Faith) Part 2

Chapter 2: What Utilitarianism Is
The Principle of Utility states, “Pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends” (Chapter 2, para. 2). John Stuart Mills defines utilitarianism throughout the second chapter, and addresses a number of dissenting opinions, all of which boil down–in his view–to a failure to understand the meaning of [...]

The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who was an advisor of one of my advisors, and therefore in a way my academic grandfather or great-uncle or something, was arrested in his own home for disorderly conduct. The details have been described in a number of places, and I won’t belabor them, but it looks like this: Dr. [...]

New pages on our blog

Dear ones,
I’m writing to call your attention to the two new pages on our blog. To the right, you’ll see links to them. The first, “Life, Death, and the End of the World” is a collection of Baha’i quotes I quickly compiled for an interfaith panel where each of seven religious representatives were given [...]

Gearing up for race unity…

Dear ones,
Lev and I have been asked to help facilitate the annual Green Acre Race Unity day (I almost wrote Racy Unity – yikes! that’s something else entirely!) this year on June 6 at the bucolic campus in Eliot, Maine.
I’m pulling together some ideas now, and this blog entry serves two purposes:
1. As [...]

a new blog is born

Brent Poirier has a new blog about the Baha’i Covenant. Check it out! Super informative

Liveblogging Al Gore, at the Harvard Sustainability Celebration

October 22, 2008, 4pm, Harvard Yard
[notes originally taken wearing gloves, edited two days later. my comments in brackets.]
An excerpt: “We are one people living on one planet. We have a few short years to make a dramatic change in the way we conduct global civilization. It is almost unimaginable that we could make a decision [...]

A little bit of corroboration

Around 1911 Abdu’l-Baha said, “When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love. Thoughts of war bring destruction to all harmony, well-being, restfulness and content. Thoughts of love are constructive of brotherhood, peace, friendship, and happiness.” [...]

A Framework for Learning about Baha’i Scholarship

In Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger discusses how groups of practitioners learn by pursuing a common enterprise. He defines practice as a shared history of learning — shared experiences of histories of participation and reification in the world. For example, the Baha’i world community is currently pursuing an enterprise of growth. Together, we are learning [...]

Baha’i Scholarship: Translating Belief into Action

Wow! After recovering from a rather painful sore throat + sinus congestion bug, it’s time to blog about the 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Baha’i Studies. Of course, I can’t do that justice in the five minutes available right now, so I’ll embed a clip of Badi, our homegrown hip hop hero, performing [...]

Six Baha’is arrested in Iran

http://news.bahai.org/story/632
I was not yet born in 1980, when the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran was arrested under similar circumstances, and disappeared. Assuredly those dear friends were executed. If history is any indication, the Baha’is who were arrested on Wednesday, May 14th 2008 will be imprisoned, threatened, told that if they would only [...]