Jeune Street

I had the great pleasure of visiting my alma mater (Trent University) last week for a brief two-day visit. I was staying with my cousins and combined some meetings for work with a talk hosted by the campus Association for Baha’i Studies. The talk was titled “Keep your god to yourself: The life and times of a secular society,” and the turnout was terrific.

After a 20 minute presentation on the genesis of our secular condition, I put forward several propositions about how religion could make itself worthy to the pressing task of providing a moral order for a global society. Many of these ideas came from an incredible letter written from the Universal House of Justice (the international governing council of the Baha’i community) to the world’s religious leaders in 2002. This is one quotation that was at the core of the talk:

Because it is concerned with the ennobling of character and the harmonizing of relationships, religion has served throughout history as the ultimate authority in giving meaning to life. In every age, it has cultivated the good, reproved the wrong and held up, to the gaze of all those willing to see, a vision of potentialities as yet unrealized. From its counsels the rational soul has derived encouragement in overcoming limits imposed by the world and in fulfilling itself. As the name implies, religion has simultaneously been the chief force binding diverse peoples together in ever larger and more complex societies through which the individual capacities thus released can find expression. The great advantage of the present age is the perspective that makes it possible for the entire human race to see this civilizing process as a single phenomenon, the ever -recurring encounters of our world with the world of God.