Is civilization to be ‘ever-advancing,’ or is it limited to moderation?
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Archive for March, 2009
Civilization
Posted by Sen on March 21, 2009
Posted in Bahai Writings, Ethics and Morality, Translations | Tagged: Baha'u'llah, Civilization, Lawh-e Maqsuud, qanat, Sen McGlinn, Shoghi Effendi, urbanisation, بـهاءالله, بهائی, بهائیت, سن مک گلین, شوقی افندی | Leave a Comment »
Stark choices
Posted by Sen on March 8, 2009
In a discussion on this blog, I referred briefly to Rodney Stark’s work on the dynamics of religious growth. Stark is primarily a sociologist, whose contribution to church history is to employ the statistical and analytic methods used in sociology. His book, The Rise of Christianity (1996, Princeton University Press) deals roughly speaking with the first three centuries of Christianity, and the first century of Mormonism, and offers a lot of food for thought for the Bahais.
Stark begins by estimating that there were 1000 Christians in the Roman Empire in the year 40. He notes that in the middle of the third century, Christians were by their own account few in number (p.5), but by the year 300 there were about 5 to 7.5 million Christians: so numerous that a few years later Constantine found it expedient to embrace the church. This has led the church in its own histories, and some scholars, to suppose that there was a mass conversion event in the late third century. But constant growth of 40% per decade, or 3.42% per year, is enough to explain these results: no mass conversion event is required. This is the same growth picture that Stark had found in his previous work on the Mormon church, which has grown hugely in 100 years without mass conversions, and it is supported by the archaeological evidence of church building sizes.
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Posted in Community | Tagged: Bahai, Bahai Faith, Benton Johnson, conservative theology, Constantine, devotional meetings, entry by troops, Hoge, Lesser Peace, liberal theology, Luidens, mass conversion, Moonies, Mormons, Rodney Stark, Ruhi, Sen McGlinn, The Rise of Christianity, triumphalism, Vanishing Boundaries, بهائی, بهائیت, سن مک گلین | 7 Comments »
Metamorphoses
Posted by Sen on March 3, 2009
[a 2009 posting, temporarily revived for Hilary Chapman]
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It’s my birthday, and I was looking in the mathom room for something given to me, that I could give to you, and thinking about what Baha’u’llah says, that copper can turn to gold if left in its mine for seventy years, and how that doesn’t seem to be working for me
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: caught up, dust bunnies, left behind, martians, odd socks, Sen McGlinn, spontaneous clutter | 1 Comment »