Rethinking Religion and Politics in a Plural World: The Baha'i International Community and the United Nations (original) (raw)

In 1884, delegates from twenty-five countries met in Washington, DC, to approve a single "world time" organized around twenty-four time zones encompassing the globe. It was a remarkable achievement; only eighty years prior, every region, every city was setting its own time based on the position of the sun. Over the course of the next several decades, all countries would calibrate their clocks according to Greenwich Mean Time. A quiet revolution had unified the world around a common measure of time. We, too, live in a time of revolutions, some quiet, some pronounced; dramatic and widespread shifts in thought and behavior arising from ideas that enter the public consciousness and alter the way in which we view and experience our human and social existence. Many such ideas arise not from the centers of power but from the periphery and gradually proliferate among the generality of people, altering thought and practice in fundamental ways. We might think of the printing press, women's suffrage, abolitionism, the Internet, to name a few. The covid-19 pandemic set the stage for further revolutions in thought and practice. In a world struggling with gross inequality and social marginalization, and the inability of leaders to mend the schisms and the wounds afflicting humanity, the pandemic has laid bare the frailties of our social order. Yet, this heightened consciousness has also prompted a greater desire, an openness, a readiness to rethink established ways of relating to one another as human beings, as communities, and as nations. It is in this spirit that the inquiry in this book unfolds: it traces the experience of a community whose ideas about social order and the mechanisms of social change refashion familiar notions of politics as well as religion. The book focuses its attention on the Bahá'í International