Rounding out the final two days of talks at this year’s Association for Bahá’í Studies conference were plenaries by a best-selling author, a distinguished sociologist, and a Professor Emeritus of English.
Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and author of the best-selling book The Upside of Down, spoke on Saturday morning of the five “tectonic stresses” he sees building up across the globe: demographic shifts, damage to environmental resources, climate change, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the global energy crisis.
Saying that it was time to stop relying on scholars or politicians for answers, Homer-Dixon urged citizens to take ownership of global problems themselves and find creative solutions to these accumulating stresses. Citing a quote from Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Baha’i faith, that “to acquire knowledge is incumbent on all,” Homer-Dixon challenged the Bahá’í community to take a leadership role in creating the groundswell of moral and ethical responsibility that he feels is a prerequisite to meaningful change.
The centerpiece of the conference, the 25th annual Hasan M. Balyuzi Memorial Lecture, was delivered on Saturday night by Canadian sociologist Dr. Will van den Hoonaard. His warm talk traced insights from his personal life experience and his lifetime of scholarship. One of van den Hoonaard’s central sociological conclusions: “We are inherently united. Separation is the social construction, unity is the truth.”
Equally important, van den Hoonaard made clear that any adequate study of society cannot be separated from a study of the source and purpose of life itself. In particular, he shared his belief that a valuable overlap exists between the goals of sociology and the practices of the Bahá’í Faith: both debunk myths, challenge assumptions, analyze behavior, and actively work to alleviate injustice in world.
Finally, van den Hoonaard lamented that so few sociologists have yet taken note of the systematic application by Bahá’ís of spiritual solutions to social and economic problems worldwide.
Last of the plenary speakers, Professor Emeritus Dr. Ross Woodman, now 85, spoke Sunday afternoon in an interview-style presentation. Woodman, a respected scholar, author, and expert on the Romantic movement, shared his thoughts about the profound influence of religious revelation on humanity’s collective unconscious.
Making reference to his culminating scholarly work, a new book titled Revelation and Knowledge, Woodman highlighted the spirit of the Bahá’í revelation as an unconscious source of inspiration for both Romantic poets and modern psychology alike. But, he noted, the real transformative power of religious revelation requires conscious understanding as well. The current presence of global violence and genocide is, for Woodman, evidence that humanity has yet to consciously harness religious revelation for its true purpose, to establish peace in the world.
These three concluding speakers brought the total number of plenary presentations to eight. They were heard by most of the approximately 1200 who attended the conference over the weekend. Attendees came from across North America as well as 13 countries outside of the continent.
Diversity was also apparent in the conference presenters, with 30 of the 73 breakout presenters being under 30 years of age (including four high school students and two recent graduates) and with many presenters representing ethnic minorities, including French Canadian, Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, and Indigenous.