Baha’i Blog celebrates its birthday every year after Naw-Ruz, and now that we’ve just celebrated our 8th birthday, it’s time for our annual top 10 countdown of Baha’i Blog’s most read articles of the year! Continue reading
School of the Nations is a Baha’i-inspired international school in Macau, and it was established in response to a need for an educational approach that incorporates both academic and moral education. It opened in 1988 with only five students and seven teachers and it has since grown to nearly 100 teachers and over 600 students, from pre-kindergarten to grade 12.
In January 2019, it was featured on the Baha’i World News Service as it celebrated its 30-year anniversary. I was thrilled to catch up with Mona Manouchehri, who assists with curriculum development at the school, to hear a first-hand account of what it’s like to work at a large Baha’i-inspired school. Continue reading
Lisa Blecker is a bit of a celebrity in our household. My three young children have, at various times, all held our board book copy of Blessed is the Spot during prayers and we have read, and sung, The Good in Me from A to Z by Dottie as a family and in our children’s class more times than I can count! When I saw that Lisa had put out a new book called Sweet Neighbors Come in All Colors, I knew it was going to be a hit with our family — and I wasn’t disappointed! It is cheerful, vibrant, sweet, fun and a book the kids ask for over and over and over again!
Because of how much her books have meant to us, I was a little star struck when I approached Lisa to find out more about her book and when I told my six year old that Lisa and I were in touch, she was floored! It was a pleasure to find out more about the book and I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did: Continue reading
We live in amazing times; I’ve become friends and have been able to collaborate with some fantastic people online. Alan and Lorraine Manifold are one such example. It’s been a pleasure to work together with them. For example, Naysan interviewed Alan about his mystery novel (that features a Baha’i detective!) titled Consulting Detective and they wrote an article called “It’s OK to Be a Feminist” that involved some insightful consultations about the equality of women and men and how we write about this weighty teaching on a personal Baha’i-inspired blog — there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes here at Baha’i Blog and if you’re ever curious about the principles and ideas that guide our work, check out our Editorial Values.
I recently learned about the “Baha’i Composition Blast”, a new brainchild of Alan and Lorraine in honor of the upcoming Bicentenary of the Birth of the Bab, and it was fascinating to hear about it. Here’s what they shared with us: Continue reading
Over three years ago we launched Baha’i Blog’s YouTube channel, where we set out to create our very own original Baha’i-inspired video content. Now, with over 350 videos on our channel, we have a variety of content to offer, including informative animations like What is the Junior Youth Spiritual Empowerment Program?, our popular music series called Studio Sessions, Baha’i-inspired talks, our short film series on creatives called The Art Of…, and the funny What’s That Word? educational series aimed at junior youth.
We are excited to be a part of the steadily growing ecosystem of Baha’i-inspired video content online, and we also contribute to this ecosystem by helping and collaborating with others to make specific videos such as The Last Time I Saw My Father and the short film Switch.
Over the last Baha’i year (from Naw-Ruz 2018 to Naw-Ruz 2019), Baha’i Blog’s YouTube channel had over 1.4 million views, and we thought it would be interesting to count down our 10 most popular YouTube videos of this last year, starting with number ten: Continue reading
A Seed in Your Heart is a new biography of the life of Louise Mathew Gregory. You may have heard of her before: she married Louis Gregory at Abdu’l-Baha’s suggestion, resulting in the first inter-racial Baha’i marriage of its kind. Janet Fleming Rose is its author and I was very interested to hear more about her book, and to learn a little about Louise Gregory and her stellar accomplishments and services to the Baha’i Faith. Here’s my conversation with Janet. I hope you find it as enlightening as I did!
I was born in Surrey in the south of England, but have lived in various parts of the world: Scotland, Fiji, Maldives, Spain and more recently Israel where I had the privilege of serving for six years at the Baha’i World Centre as Acquisitions Librarian.
I’ve always had a love of books and the ambition to have a book published. I studied modern languages at the University of Edinburgh and trained as a professional librarian. My hobbies and interests include travelling the world, a love of history, a passion for wild flowers, birding, rambling, learning other languages, an interest in other cultures and singing along to Classic FM radio.
For the last 12 years I’ve lived with my husband, Andrew, in St Albans, an ancient Roman city and burial place of the first English Christian martyr, St Alban.
It’s been eight years of Baha’i Blog, and we’re super excited to have come this far! The Baha’i Blog team is honored to be able to continue creating Baha’i-inspired content in the online space and we hope you’ve enjoyed our content and found it useful, informative, and inspiring over the years.
With so much going on here at Baha’i Blog, there’s no way we can cover everything we want to share in this article, but here’s a glance of some of the things we’ve been working on over the last Baha’i year: Continue reading
Hand of the Cause of God William Sears (1911-1992). Photo courtesy of the Baha'i International Community.
When setting out to write this article, I felt overwhelmed: William Sears accomplished so much in his 80 years. How to distill decades of service, achievements, and adventures into a short article? Here I’ve only captured the outlines of a man who seized every opportunity to serve—who once said, “I need only to remember one thing: nothing must come between me and my responsibilities to God and to my fellow man. Glory is not his who loves his country, his family, or himself alone. Glory is his who loves his kind. This, I believe, has helped me to look upon each dawn as a new adventure.”
A spiritual light burned in Sears practically from his birth on March 28, 1911. Starting in 1912, at 18 months old, he had dreams about a Holy Man—dreams which, he later discovered, began when that Holy Man, Abdu’l-Baha, visited Minnesota, where Sears grew up. Raised in the Catholic Church, Sears was full of questions about religion, and was supported in his investigations by his grandfather. His father, however, was bewildered as the boy voraciously studied the Bible and proclaimed, “Someday I’m going to go all over the world and tell people about God.” Continue reading
As a new Baha’i year begins, I am profoundly grateful to the Universal House of Justice for releasing a wealth of newly translated and compiled Writings for us to study, as well as writing several letters to the Baha’is of the World, over the last year. Here is a short list of what has been made publicly and freely available to us in English including Tablets, prayers, compilations, and letters: Continue reading