This panel brings together four presentations that explore how Bahá’í thought engages some of the most pressing intellectual, moral, and global challenges of our time by reframing questions of agency, responsibility and collective action. Moving from a philosophical analysis of history and politics to a theological reexamination of sin, the panel highlights how moral obligation and human choice are understood as relational and historically situated rather than abstract and universalized. It further examines tensions in the application of the principle of the harmony of science and religion, particularly in shifting Bahá’í discourses on sexuality, revealing how institutional engagement with scientific authority evolves in response to changing knowledge. Finally, it addresses the fragmentation of contemporary climate discourse, proposing a more integrative conceptual framework for collective action. Taken together, the panel advances a unifying theme: that overcoming fragmentation—whether in politics, ethics, science, or environmental action—requires a coherent, flexible framework rooted in an evolving Baha’i understanding of global unity, human agency, and consultative processes.
In its message of 1985 to the peoples of the world, the Universal House of Justice declared that world peace is "not only possible but inevitable," yet insisted that whether it arrives through unimaginable suffering or through consultative will is the choice before all of humanity. The apparent tension between inevitability and choice dissolves once we recognize how the Promise of World Peace rejects three historical orientations that Timothy Snyder identifies as presently infecting our politics. These are the politics of eternity, which traps us in a mythical past; the politics of inevitability, which traps us in a complacent present; and the politics of catastrophe, which forecloses the future through despair. Each is rooted in two pervasive habits of mind—the proclivity to totalize reality and the proclivity to fragment it. The Promise counters these by grounding hope and action in an inclusive historical consciousness that understands humanity as inevitably maturing toward oneness—a destiny that is assured, but whose cost depends entirely on our consultative will.
This paper examines a covenantal understanding of sin and moral obligation in Bahá’í theology. While the Bahá’í Faith presents the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh as the divine guidance for the present age, Bahá’ís do not seek to impose their moral laws on others. This paper argues that this apparent tension is resolved through a covenantal framework in which moral accountability arises within specific relationships to divine revelation. Drawing on the writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and recent Bahá’í institutional guidance, the paper proposes that sin is best understood as misalignment with divine guidance within a recognized covenant rather than as the violation of a universalized moral code. Situating this framework alongside covenantal approaches in contemporary Christian theology, the paper explores how layered forms of moral accountability across religious communities may offer a coherent model for comparative theological reflection on sin and ethical responsibility.
The Baha’i relationship to science is usually presented, in both primary and secondary literature, as straightforwardly positive: Baha’is are said to embrace the “harmony of science and religion,” in which science and religion are two separate but complementary systems that reveal greater knowledge about the world. However, looking at authoritative Baha’i writings on same-gender relationships demonstrates that this is too simple a picture. As the dominant medical views on sexual diversity have shifted, Baha’i authorities have gone from embracing the idea that being gay or lesbian was a medical condition subject to cure, thus treating religion and science as partners in making moral claims, to disputing the scientific findings on sexual orientation, then finally downplaying the relevance of medicine to understandings of sexual morality. This pattern suggests that the ways in which Baha’i institutions use the language and authority of scientific findings is dependent on the content of those findings.
The challenge of addressing climate change is not merely technical or political, but a crisis of orientation. As the consequences of a warming planet grow increasingly clear, a core question is not simply "what" to do, but how to reconcile the many approaches and perspectives of a deeply concerned and fragmented humanity. This paper takes the debate surrounding An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) as a window into this problem, reading the exchange between the manifesto's techno-optimist vision and its degrowth critics as symptomatic of a broader pathology in climate discourse: fragmentation, ideological entrenchment, and the treatment of other perspectives as obstacles rather than interlocutors. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the Institute for Studies in Global Prosperity, a research organization inspired by the Bahá'í Faith, the paper takes initial steps toward articulating a "coherent yet evolving" orientation capable of guiding diverse forms of action toward shared ends.