By george wesley dannells on Feb 16, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(0)
Bob:That man is richest whose pleasures are simplest…I find Bob’s post very moving. Click over and read his entire post and then link to his earlier post. -gw…when I got home… Amy was talking to our Baha’i neighbor on the phone. She and her son are planning a pilgrimage to the Baha’i holy land to visit the shrines in Haifa, Israel. She was telling us about it at last year’s block party. There’s like a 5-year waiting list to go on pilgrimage and their number was finally coming up.
Anyways, one of her friends just returned from a pilgrimage and would be sharing her experience and photos last night. She invited us to go.
Now, I’m not particularly interested in the Baha’i faith but I am interested in my neighbor. In understanding her, learning about what she believes, and more than anything else, trying to show we are interested in her as a person. Basically, we decided to go to the presentation because we wanted to foster our relationship with her.The presentation was entirely too long (for me) but it was interesting enough to help me understand some of the basics of her belief. We met some of her friends and got reacquainted with others we’d already met.I say all that to say this. This isn’t church. I cannot be. It can only be mission. Our participation is not to merge the two religions or find common ground. Our participation is for the purpose of understanding an individual, our neighbor, accepting the invitations she extends in sharing her life, and simply trying to love her. It is a slow process but last night was a 3 hour investment in our relationship. We look forward to sharing her anticipation as she embarks on a pilgrimage of her own. She has already asked us to pray for her trip to go smoothly (there are some complications that could cause her no to go at this point).All in all, the evening went well. Our mission slowly moves forward drawn by the Spirit to who knows where.Bob, “Accepting Invitations,” Bob: That man is richest whose pleasures are simplest…
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By george wesley dannells on Feb 15, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(0)
Emilie doesn’t freak out, nay rather, she is open-minded and accepting about religious diversity. -gw
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Today we had a Bahai speaker in my Comparative Religions class. I think I’m going to like that class better than I thought I would. It was interesting…not really what she had to say but how we reacted. It was neat to see how we were really all on the same page. I’m glad I’m a really open-minded person about stuff. I think it’s important to know and fully understand something before you form your opinions about it. I get so sick of people who are so afraid anything different and they immediately go into defense mode and freak out. It comes across as they are a weak person who is so afraid of doing wrong they can’t stand anything that contradicts with what they believe. Get over it! The world isn’t all the same! A strong person would know what they believe, have faith in that, and not spend their time reprimanding people for doing what they see as wrong.
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Emilie, “Baha’i…” Saber_of_Light
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By george wesley dannells on Feb 15, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(0)
From Upplands Väsby, Sweden, Borna beams his blog to the world. -gw
the reflection meeting went really well, at least from a personal point of view. the presentation was very much appreciated by the attendants, and they said that they had a completely new view on the statistics and what was happening in the cluster. glad to be of help!
activity-wise for me, things are probably starting to happen again. I’ve had a long break from mostly everything because I haven’t been sure where I’m going and what I’ll be doing. now that I finally have some sense of stability it is time to get going. our teaching team, gloria, juan and I, have started planning some activities, and hopefully we’ll soon get a junior youth group started. of course the football will also bring us in contact with many people, and the plan is to apply many of the Baha’i principles there too. naturally, it is more important to create a united group that has fun and develops than only focusing on winning. it’s a challenge, but we’re up for it.
finally, it’s time for me to start reading, deepening, and studying, different kinds of things. got one course still left in uni, will probably take it some time in the summer. and then of course I want to read loads of books. and also probably go through the Ruhi books by myself, just for refreshment. always good to study the Writings. we’ll see what happens…
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By george wesley dannells on Feb 14, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(2)
The interfaith movement is strongly felt at edinburgh uni, apparently. -gw
on monday went for a fantastic interfaith session. it was pretty interesting. for their own reasons, the jewish society wasn’t involved. which was kinda sad. so it was the islamic soc, the christian union and the baha’i society. got to know people, and eat free food, then they got us split up into groups and talking to each other. it was pretty fab. my group (creatively called we’re all wearing jeans.) initially consisted of a northern irish guy from the cu, and an english guy from the baha’i soc. the most fascinating part was how similar we all were when it comes to the way we deal with our respective religions. all of us agreed that nature helped us be closer to God, and that temptation was hard to avoid in university. also we discussed how the most important thing when it came to the people we hung out with was the presence of some kind of moral guideline, something that drove people, which prevents people from being shallow and kind of silly, really. its not really religion, because there are people who don’t believe in anything who still have moral direction, but i think those people who honestly don’t even think about what they’re doing in a larger context tend to be hard to be with. its not just annoying in its self-centredness, but its tiring as well.
Coloured Light, “Friday, February 09, 2007,” Food Friends Fluff
{Re-posted with permission}
By george wesley dannells on Feb 13, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(1)
Brief mentions. -gw
i’m by no means looking for a religion, but i have this policy of trying to go to anything someone invites me to, so we went to a meeting of soka gakkai buddhists and another one for baha’is this weekend. +
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so in composition class, we are focusing on the harlem renaissance. & i was researching alain locke who was an significant writer of the time, who wrote a lot of important pieces such as “the new negro” & i found out… he was a baha’i! same religion as me.
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Im now reading Freakanomis and an introduction to Baha’i teachings. Cool stuff. Quick note on Baha’i initial reactions: Why are all the prayers in old english? +
By george wesley dannells on Feb 12, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(1)
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“There is nothing in our Writiings that would preclude a female Manifestation of God… and we only know of about nine Manifestations. We are told there were many more so it is possible a female Manifestation already has appeared.” -Arthra
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By george wesley dannells on Feb 11, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(1)
“The game Unreal is familiar to computer games fans worldwide as one of the most prominent games of the ‘run and gun’ genre - otherwise known as ‘first person shooters’.”
So begins an article on the work of Chris Nelson, a Baha’i who is head of the computer games design course at the University of Ballarat, that appeared in ABC Ballarat in Australia, entitled “Subverting violent computer games with religious poetry.”
“What I’ve done is to take a computer game - a first person shooter computer game, where the main idea is to actually run around and kill your opponents, and the person who gets the most kills wins in the end. I’ve taken it and subverted it, using the game to create an interactive artwork based on the mystical treatise The Seven Valleys,” said Chris.
The Seven Valleys homepage is here, and more about Chris is here. -gw
By george wesley dannells on Feb 11, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(0)
“Spaceship Church in Yongsan:This building may not have always been a church but today it’s a Christian church connected to a Buddhist Temple ” uploaded on April 7, 2006 by SuzÿQuzÿ on flickr
I KNOW that not all Christians congregations are like the ones I’ve experienced in Korea. Although, I was told that a lot of the Christians in Korea view evangelical work as a high priority. I just don’t understand religions and the people who practice.
Next week, I will be able to go to a Baha’i service. Maybe something non-Christian will make more sense to me. Who knows?
By george wesley dannells on Feb 9, 2007 in Baha'i Views | comments(0)
Immediately below is how the Baha’i Chair for World Peace is described on its website at http://www.bahaipeacechair.org/
The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland is an academic institution dedicated to developing and applying material and spiritual knowledge in cooperative pursuits of global peace, social and economic justice, and human security.
On her LiveJournal blog DaliaBloom describes her delight in being asked to be a teaching assistant for one of the courses being taught by Dr Grayzel, the Baha’i Chair for World Peace, at her school. For a recent story about Dr Grayzel’s presentation at the Orlando Baha’i SED conference go here. -gw
HONR299A Creating Alternative Futures (Teaching Assistant). Best for last baby. While I was in France last spring I realized, after analyzing a particular aspect of my speech, that I wasn’t thinking far enough into the future. That I was only taking the near future into account. Then I considered France, which although they know how to live well, is a nation that abhors the future. I wanted to educate myself more about futures on a national level, so I settled on one class for the fall semester called Peacebuilding, Regional Ethnography, & Post Conflict Reconstruction. It’s essentially International Development, taught by Dr. Grayzel, Maryland’s newest Baha’i Chair for World Peace and a former officer of USAID overseas for 27 years. Imagine my delight when I discovered Dr. Grayzel was teaching a honors seminar the next semester on the FUTURE. And then my intensified delight when he asked me to be the TA! So far we’ve talked about Utopian theory. Tomorrow is a guest lecturer from Israel who’s an expert on Leibniz. And I’m going to talk about how Leibniz’s philosophy relates to Spinoza’s. Oh boy!
DaliaBloom, “The Rundown,” The Taming of the Jew: silly, semitic, sincere
Bob:That man is richest whose pleasures are simplest…
