49th Annual Conference of the Association for Bahá’í Studies: connecting mind, heart, and spirit

Highlights this year include a wide range of pre-conference seminars and a session for youth aged 15-21.

This year, the Association for Bahá’í Studies conference took place in Calgary, Alta., from August 1 to 3, with about 2000 participants, including 110 children and 70 junior youth. Participants explored how academic inquiry can contribute to conditions of human flourishing. The conference serves as a convergence point for several year-round initiatives that are raising the capacity of the North American Bahá’í community to contribute to the prevalent discourses of society.

Leading up to the conference, thematic seminars took place on topics such as technology and society, mental health, and the climate and environment. There was a total of 19 seminars with 300 participants. Many of the seminars drew on the efforts of small groups who meet throughout the year, organizing reading and writing groups for participants from specific fields of study.

Todd Smith, a member of the ABS Executive Committee, explains that the seminars help participants correlate key ideas from the Bahá’í Writings to the professional and academic discourses they are familiar with. He comments, “There was a level of joy and excitement about engaging in the various learning processes that people have had that built on the previous years and was at an even higher level this year.”

Through correlating spiritual principles with modern thought, the participants learn to harmonize perspectives. This leads to constructive contributions that can be built on by many, year after year. Darren Hedley, co-facilitator of the climate seminar, says: “Participants shared views of how to make a unique difference to society and increase scientific learning around the natural environment. If we continue to call for oneness, justice, moderation and a rebalancing towards spiritual values, it will help humanity overcome polarization and reduce the negative effects of environmental disruptions.”

Another meaningful collaboration took place during the first evening of the conference, when Chief Troy Bossman Knowlton welcomed the audience to the ancestral territory of the Blackfoot Nation. The Chief spoke of how his grandparents were Bahá’ís; in fact, they welcomed Ruhiyyih Khanum to their home when she visited the Piikani reserve, south of Calgary, Alta., in 1960.[i]

The core programming of the conference included several plenary sessions, among them a panel reflecting on 50 years of learning from the founders of FUNDAEC, a keynote that called for new approaches to technological innovation, and another offering an Indigenous perspective on what it means to be educated and guided. There were also many breakout sessions, during which individuals presented their research, followed by a discussion and question-and-answer period. First-time participant Fatema Alawadhi says, “It was eye-opening to see how spiritual concepts can be applied to address real-world issues.”

For the first time this year, there was also a session for youth aged 15-21, developed in consultation with coordinators of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity. They studied the 26 May 2024 message from the Universal House of Justice, which focuses on the Bahá’í response to various conflicts and humanitarian crises.[ii] Shamim Seyson, who facilitated the group, shares, “The youth looked at the immediate effects of these crises and the suffering of people and tried to articulate the root causes and moral principles behind them, as disunity is a central issue.”

The youth discussed how to identify constructive spaces to engage in, and how, through both deeds and words, they can, as the House of Justice writes, “discover that precious point of unity where contrasting perspectives overlap and around which contending peoples can coalesce.”[iii] This work “is not just an intellectual task,” explains Mert Ozyonum, another facilitator of the group, “It is a spiritual process.”

Many of the youth participants serve as junior youth animators and describe these educational initiatives as arenas for learning about how to build peace at the neighbourhood level. Mr. Seyson notes, “It’s not a dichotomy—that we only care about what is on the news or we only care about our local communities—it’s all linked, and we are one humanity.”

Recordings of the plenary sessions and several other presentations can be found here.

[i] His grandparents were Sampson and Rosie Knowlton. See “Remembering Ruhíyyíh Khánum’s visits to Piikani Nation” in the Spring 2018 issue of Bahá’í Canada.
[ii] From the Universal House of Justice to the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity, 26 May 2024.
[iii] From the Universal House of Justice to the Bahá’ís of the World, 25 November 2020.