31st Annual Conference
Scholarship and Community Building

Community is the organic entity in which human spiritual and material potential can emerge.  It is where people interact and where they try to enact the knowledge received from both spiritual insight and from the pursuit of sciences, arts, and humanities. The process of building a new kind of community, at once world-embracing and locally rooted, must acknowledge the community as a “comprehensive unit of civilisation”1 and its capacity to set a “new course in social evolution.”2

Within the community, those pursuing scholarship, through whatever diverse paths, can play specific roles. They not only contribute to the community’s evolution through their expertise3, but also are an integral part of the dynamic of all community life.  This dynamic changes and grows with new understandings of human realities, which in turn stimulate new knowledge and new ways of sharing that knowledge. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, defining the characteristics of the spiritually learned, advised that they should acquire both spiritual and material perfections in order to serve society, should be knowledgeable in diverse religious, cultural, political, historical and scientific knowledge,  and should “arise with complete sincerity and purity of purpose” to educate people.4 

The Bahá’í efforts in community building require a profound understanding and exploration of the Guardian’s statement that, “The principle of the Oneness of mankind -- the pivot round which all the teachings of Baha’u’llah revolve . . . implies an organic change in the structure of present day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.”5 

The Association for Bahá’í Studies executive committee invites both new and more experienced presenters to explore the theme of scholarship and community building at its annual conference in Toronto.  Possible sub-topics might include: scholarship and social responsibility, the Five Year Plan, religious scholarship without priesthood, creating new paradigms of scholarship and education, and new ideas of community and relationship within the physical and life sciences, amongst others. 

Citations:

1. Universal House of Justice, Ridván 1996 to the Bahá’ís of the World.

2. Universal House of Justice, Ridván 1984 to the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States.

3. Universal House of Justice, 21 August 1977 to an individual, Scholarship compilation, selection #39.

4. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Secret of Divine Civilization, 35-36.

5. Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 43