‘Irfán Colloquium #12 (English)

Newcastle, England

PAPERS

A study of some sixty passages in the Bahá'i scriptures that state different purposes of religion.

There is a series of approaches to apparently exclusivist passages in Bahá'u'llah's writings that minimize their tendency to exclude non-Bahá'is.

One part of this paper discussed cryonics (freezing people at the point of death in the hope that in the future they can be thawed and revived) and its possible implications for Bahá'i theology.

The paper offers an overview of the tablet's context as one of a series of messages penned by Manifestations to religious and political leaders and surveyed the tablet's contents, including possible allusions to the First Vatican Council (1869).

Bahá'u'llah's concept of God and its ability to reconcile Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and some Buddhist notions of the Ultimate.

Presentation of and commentary on a provisional translation of Bahá'u'llah's Surat al-ism (Sura of the Name), a tablet revealed in 1867.

Review of the different aspects of the Bahá'i vision of the future; most are optimistic and progressive.

The importance of earlier tablets by Bahá'u'llah in understanding the Kitab-i-Iqan, that the Iqan's literary paradigm is that of a mystic journey of the seeker, and that the paradigm shaped Bahá'u'llah's replies to the questions that prompted the revelation of the Iqan.