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Summer 1979

World order

Long Hot Summers of Discontent

Editorial

The Year of the Child

Robert Hayden

Ecumenism and the

Agapastic Attitude

Mary Carman Rose

To Move the World:

The Early Years of

Louis Gregory

Gayle Morrison

Index

Volume 13

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World Order

A BAHÁ’Í MAGAZINE • VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4 • PUBLISHED QUARTERLY

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:

FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH

BETTY J. FISHER

HOWARD GAREY

ROBERT HAYDEN

GLENFORD E. MITCHELL

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091. Application to Mail at Second-class postage rates is pending at Wilmette, IL. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091.

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end. The contributor should keep a carbon copy. Return postage should be included.

Subscription rates: USA, 1 year, $6.00; 2 years, $11.00; single copies, $1.60. All other countries, 1 year, $7.00; 2 years, $13.00; single copes $1.60.

Copyright © 1980, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, World Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2 Long Hot Summers of Discontent

Editorial

5 A Forum: Concerning Saint Paul

15 The State of the Bahá’í Community in Írán

by the Human Rights Commission of the

Federation of Protestant Churches in

Switzerland

21 To Move the World: The Early Years of

Louis Gregory, by Gayle Morrison

44 The Year of the Child

a poem by Robert Hayden

47 Ecumenism and the Agapastic Attitude

by Mary Carman Rose

60 World Order Index, Volume 13

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue

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Long Hot Summers of Discontent

THE THOUGHT of long hot summers conjures images of languid days and sultry nights, stretches of leisure time, gamboling, the cooling enchantments of rolling waters, the allure of exotic lands. But in the decade of the sixties the term “long hot summer” came to connote a harsh reality: the heating up of racial conflicts that caused American cities to explode in violence. During only one such summer about forty cities were aflame as riots spread throughout the country. Detroit was ablaze and under army occupation when in the summer of 1967 President Lyndon Johnson appointed a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder to investigate the causes of the riots.

An idea of the damage wrought by these disorders was given in a 26 February 1978 New York Times article stating that from 1965 to 1969, when the riots began to decline, about 250 persons were killed, 12,000 injured, and 83,000 arrested. Property damage was estimated to have been several hundred million dollars.

After one year of study the Commission issued a voluminous report with a succinct conclusion: “Our nation,” it said, “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate but unequal.” The report blamed white racism for the riots, which the Commission saw as a form of social protest against the harsh and degrading conditions forced on blacks. The report attempted to identify the basic needs of blacks if they were to overcome their disabilities—needs that, if fulfilled, would enable them to share in the economic and social progress enjoyed by other Americans. Troubled by the protests and the meaning that the Commission attached to them, whites displayed a resolve to remedy the injustices that lay behind the disorders.

After ten years of relatively cool summers, what assessment can one make? While federal government aid to the cities has been greatly increased, the ghettos remain unchanged and grow worse. Although a large number of blacks have entered the middle class, unemployment among blacks as a whole has doubled. Even though the residential boundaries for blacks have expanded, American society continues to be mostly segregated. According to a survey conducted jointly by the New York Times and CBS News, new attitudes about race relations and new understanding among whites have increased, but the will to complete the remedy to racial conflicts has waned. Blacks perceive more tolerance on the part of whites but have less hope. It would seem, then, that although the society has not exactly been standing still, it has been marking time. The deep issues of race relations in the United States remain largely unresolved.

[Page 3] Such a disheartening assessment convinces Bahá’ís that what they have always claimed is still a fact: racial prejudice is the most challenging issue confronting the American people. Knowing that centuries of ingrained prejudice cannot easily be overcome, Bahá’ís patiently persist in their commitment to the equality of the races. The transformations already evident in the relationships existing among the different races composing their worldwide community lend them encouragement, as does the shining example set by Louis G. Gregory, one of the early black American Bahá’ís (the first installment of whose life story appears in this issue of WORLD ORDER).

But above all, the efforts of the Bahá’ís are sustained by the specific guidance contained in the teachings of their Faith. For example, forty years ago Shoghi Effendi addressed a profound challenge to black and white Americans. His guidance is relevant to the situation today and deserves the careful consideration of all Americans who wish to avoid any return to the violent summers of the sixties. He wrote:

“Let the white make a supreme effort in their resolve to contribute their share to the solution of this problem, to abandon once for all their usually inherent and at times subconscious sense of superiority, to correct their tendency towards revealing a patronizing attitude towards the members of the other race, to persuade them through their intimate, spontaneous and informal association with them of the genuineness of their friendship and the sincerity of their intentions, and to master their impatience of any lack of responsiveness on the part of a people who have received, for so long a period, such grievous and slow-healing wounds. Let the Negroes, through a corresponding effort on their part, show by every means in their power the warmth of their response, their readiness to forget the past, and their ability to wipe out every trace of suspicion that may still linger in their hearts and minds. Let neither think that the solution of so vast a problem is a matter that exclusively concerns the other. Let neither think that such a problem can either easily or immediately be resolved. . . . Let neither think that anything short of genuine love, extreme patience, true humility, consummate tact, sound initiative, mature wisdom, and deliberate, persistent, and prayerful effort, can succeed in blotting out the stain which this patent evil has left on the fair name of their common country.”

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A Forum: Concerning Saint Paul

FROM TIME TO TIME we publish articles and reviews that evoke an extraordinary response from our readers. William S. Hatcher’s review of Udo Schaefer’s The Light Shineth in Darkness, printed in our Summer 1978 issue, is one such review. Ordinarily, we publish letters to the editor in a column called Interchange. Because of the length of the comments we have received, we are departing from our usual format and are publishing the responses as a forum.

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R. GREGORY SHAW, Mayaguez, Puerto Rico: Though I had eagerly anticipated William Hatcher’s review of [Udo] Schaefer’s The Light Shineth in Darkness, I was dismayed to find the reviewer had failed to discover that an entire section of that otherwise fine book appears to be at complete variance with a Bahá’í viewpoint. Not only did Mr. Hatcher fail to disclose the error, he attempted to support it. I refer to the several pages devoted to an attack upon St. Paul. The author states that St. Paul introduced into Christianity ideas of philosophy foreign to Christ’s teaching, permanently distorting the religion. He goes on to imply that Paul (“a usurper”) had never truly experienced a vision of Christ, was not correctly listed among the Apostles, and, in truth, was the arch-heretic of that Dispensation. I do not see how this denigrating evaluation of the Christian saint can be reconciled with references made in other more authoritative Bahá’í sources.

In ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (H. M. Balyuzi, George Ronald, 1971), the Center of Bahá’u’lláh’s Covenant [‘Abdu’l-Bahá] calls Paul “‘the great Apostle’” (p. 148), a “‘celestial’” bird, a “‘divine Philosopher,’” and a “‘heavenly doctor among the Jews, who suffered for the Cause of God (p. 354). The divine inspiration of Paul’s word is proven by the fulfillment of his prophecy in 2 Thess. 2, as explained by Shoghi Effendi (Esplandor del Dia Prometido, Mehrabkhani, Editorial Baha’i de España, 1974, p. 169). ‘Abdu’l-Bahá even confirms the necessity of some of the changes Paul introduced into the Christian community (Some Answered Questions [Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1964], pp. 107-08). In The Bahäí Proofs (Abul-Fazl, New York: Baha’i Publishing Society, 1914)—a book prepared at the specific bidding of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá by the foremost scholar of the Faith, Mírzá Abul-Fazl —second-century converts to Christianity are blamed for the major distortions introduced into the religion (pp. 96-97). St. Paul, on the other hand, is extolled as “that upright saint and eloquent orator” whose power came from the Word of God (pp. 171-72); “that elect Apostle” who attempted to protect the young community from the “mistaken reasoning” of idle philosophy and turn its orientation to “the Divine Word received from the blessed Beauty of Christ” (pp. 278-79).

In sum, I believe a great injustice has been done to the memory of a martyred saint, an inspired genius—quoted by Bahá’u’lláh in His Epistle to the Son of the Wolf—who, correctly viewed, proclaimed the emancipation of Christianity from Judaism as Ṭáhirih would later proclaim the emancipation of the Báb’s followers from Islam. Furthermore, it appears obvious that an incorrect theological position that Christian readers could rightly condemn has been connected to the Bahá’í Faith. I trust that your magazine [Page 6] will not allow the error to stand uncorrected.

WILLIBALD DUERSCHMID, Traunreut, West Germany: Concerning the review of Udo Schaefer’s The Light Shineth in Darkness . . . I agree with William S. Hatcher except to Paul’s theology.

In the Writings of the Bahá’í Revelation I do not know a passage indicating that Paul usurped the authority of Peter. Mr. Hatcher asserts (footnote 5, p. 37) that . . . in The Promised Day Is Come Shoghi Effendi states explicitly that in the Bahá’í Faith “‘the primacy of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, is upheld and defended.”’ But in The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1965, pp. 21, 145) Shoghi Effendi clearly demonstrates that the primacy of Peter and his successors who are the Successors of Christ is the foundation of the unity of the Church. In a Tablet (Star of the West, 10 [June 5, 1919], 95) ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states explicitly that Arius was a Covenant-breaker. Three hundred years after Christ Arius had separated himself from the Church the foundation of the unity of which was the primacy of Peter.

Udo Schaefer opposes Paul’s notion of redemption through blood atonement. But Bahá’u’lláh confirms this doctrine (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh [Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1976], Chapter XXXII). . . . It is an essential part of the Religion of God that the Prophets and martyrs atone for the sins of men. There are many mysteries in such acts of atonement (The Kitáb-i-Íqán: The Book of Certitude [Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974], p. 129). In Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh sections XXXII and XXXIX indicate that it is an essential quality of the pre-existent Word of God to atone for the sins of the world. In the history of mankind all these acts of atonement are but reflections of that essential quality of the Word of God, and the substitutional sacrificial atonement by Jesus is especially important because first Jesus has revealed Himself as the pre-existent Word of God. As Christ is the Word and has revealed this essential quality of the Word, all these acts of atonement are reflections of the substitutional sacrificial atonement by Jesus Christ. Consequently, Paul’s doctrine of the single redemptive act of Jesus’ death on the cross is confirmed by the Bahá’í Revelation. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá does not reject this doctrine of the Apostle Paul, but in Some Answered Questions, Chapter XXX, He refuses to accept a subsequent doctrine devised by Christians.

In my opinion, the resurrection of Christ is the principal subject in Paul’s theology. The resurrection of Christ signifies that the pre-existent Word of God is the quickening Spirit and the cause of spiritual life in all mankind. Adam is the cause of physical life; Christ is the cause of spiritual life. This doctrine is confirmed by the Bahá’í Revelation, too. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá speaks of it in Some Answered Questions, Chapter XXIX.

In a Tablet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá writes: “There were many Doctors amongst the Jews, but they were all earthly, but St. Paul became heavenly because he could fly upwards. In his own time no one duly recognized him; nay, rather, he spent his days amidst difficulties and contempt. Afterwards it became known that he was not an earthly bird, he was a celestial one; he was not a natural philosopher, but a divine philosopher.” (H. M. Balyuzi, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá [Oxford: George Ronald, 1972], pp. 353-54).

Though ‘Abdu’l-Bahá esteems St. Paul to such a high degree, remarkably, in contrast, there are many Bahá’ís asserting that Paul had much deformed the character of the Revelation of Christ. I see a contradiction in this. These Bahá’ís run the risk of thinking only the so-called Nazarenes to be the genuine Christians as Udo [Page 7] Schaefer thinks logically according to his suppositions. But in The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh (p. 57) Shoghi Effendi condemns the Nazarenes because they persevered in the practice of the Mosaic Law which Christ and His Apostles including Paul had abrogated, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains in Some Answered Questions, Chapter XX.

CHRISTOPHER BUCK, Bellingham, Washington: In response to William S. Hatcher’s review of The Light Shineth in Darkness, it might prove worthwhile to enlarge upon an overlooked, but crucial aspect of Udo Schaefer’s perspective on Christianity.

First, Schaefer originally “became acquainted with the founder of the Christian religion through H. J. Schoeps’ Theologie Und Geschichte Des Judenchristentums” and “was deeply impressed” (p. 87). Moreover, Schaefer positively links the Bahá’í Faith with Ebionite Christianity. The author expressly commends to Bahá’ís the fruits of research into this major, perhaps most original form of early Oriental Christianity (pp. 83-84). Neither Schaefer nor his translators knew, evidently, of a particular work of Hans-Joachim Schoeps in English which could prove the most useful scholarly resource for American Bahá’ís: . . . Jewish Christianity: Factional Disputes in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969). . . .

The typical polemic against Paul, as so fascinatingly formulated by Nazarene-Ebionite Christianity, was taken up by Islamic theologians. For instance, Edward Granville Browne (“A Parallel to the Story in the Mathnaví of Jalálu’d-Dín Rúmí, of the Jewish King Who Persecuted the Christians,” Islamica, II [1926], 129-34) shows how “the Persian Qur’án (as the Mathnaví is often styled) preserves a tradition relating the perversion of Christianity to Paul. Other outstanding champions of Islám, who sought to vindicate true Christianity (Islám) through exposing the corruptions of orthodox Christianity, are the former Nestorian Christian ‘Alí b. Rabban al-Tabari (Refutation of the Christians), as well as Ibn Hazm (Kitáb al-Faṣl fi’l Milal wa’l Ahwá’ wa’l Niḥal) and others. . . . But probably the most captivating work is the discovery in 1966 of a Nazarene-Ebionite source preserved in Arabic and “rather maladroitly and carelessly adapted by ‘Abd al-Jabbar” (Shlomo Pines, The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity According to a New Source, published as Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Vol. II, No. 13).

Dr. Hatcher . . . is correct in arguing for the distinction between the Qur’anic term for Evangel (al-injíl) and the books of Paul, often referred to throughout Islamic literature as kutub Búlus.

With this background, the Bahá’í Faith having its most immediate spiritual roots in Islám, it becomes apparent how Mr. Schaefer could well concur with Mawláná Sayyid Amir ‘Alí’s famous statement: “The Moslem belief probably is in accord with that of the primitive Christians—of the Ebionites, ‘the sect of the poor,’ to whom Jesus had preached and among whom he had lived. It has nothing in common with Pauline Christianity” (“Christianity from the Islamic Standpoint,” in Hibbert Journal [1906], p. 247).

. . . Bahá’u’lláh (Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 173) appears to have known that the earliest Christian scriptures were set forth in Hebrew, and the Báb (Selections from the Writings of the Báb, p. 137) represents mainstream, Pauline Christianity as having lost access to genuine apostolic direction.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Star of the West, 8 [June 24, 1917], 60) attributes superstitious ascetism to Paul. In Some Answered Questions, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá observes how Paul violated the pact of the Jerusalem Conference. . . . However, Paul’s moral fibre, eloquence, and surpassng zeal all find ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s praise and thus warrant a [Page 8] corresponding respect on the part of all Bahá’ís.

Probably the most striking specimen text in this vein appears on pages 223-24 of Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá extols the conduct of Paul, and champions the faith of Peter. It is extremely revealing that in this particular statement, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is careful to single out Paul’s finest virtue, yet does not endorse Paul’s own special interpretation of Christ’s religion! Such endorsement is reserved solely for Peter. Otherwise, were this not so, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would have praised the faith of both Peter and Paul. Apparently, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was aware of the discord that broke out in both the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic Ages of Christianity (Ten Days in the Light of ‘Akká, p. 41). Udo Schaefer might well identify ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s endorsement of Peter’s faith as being an oblique endorsement of Ebionite beliefs, which are distinctively Petrine. Various pilgrims’ records (such as those of Ted Cardell [date unknown], Mrs. Margery McCormick [1937], Mrs. May Maxwell and Mary Maxwell [1937], Jessie and Ethel Revell [1953], and Amy Raubitschek [1955]) show that Shoghi Effendi felt that Paul was both an usurper and an heresiarch. . . . This representation of Shoghi Effendi is strengthened by suggestive observations in The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh (notably, pp. 56-57, 74, 145, and 184-85). Although appeal to pilgrimage accounts is confessedly weak, yet in this context both the consistency as well as recurrence of those reports are astonishing.

If Udo Schaefer’s linking of the Bahá’í Faith to Nazarene-Ebionite Christianity finds favor in the Bahá’í world, it will become necessary to distinguish various kinds of Nazarenes and Ebionites, partly because history demands this, and partly on account of the fact that not all Nazarenes were praiseworthy. For instance, Shoghi Effendi (The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 57) rightly castigates those Nazarenes who sought to petrify Christianity in the prevailing Pharisaic practices. . . .

As to “the precise Bahá’í understanding” Hatcher . . . conceives, no adequate discussion of Bahá’u’lláh’s doctrine of Manifestation in relation to the physical temple can afford to ignore the Tablet of the Manifestation found in Bahá’í Scriptures. It is not quite clear why Dr. Hatcher stresses . . . “‘the substance of God.’” Dr. Hatcher, moreover, confuses . . . preëxistence of the Manifestation with Jesus. Disbelief in the preëxistence of Jesus can be a legitimate Bahá’í view, since Christ (who preëxists) is distinct from Jesus.

Last, Dr. Hatchet represents atonement through blood sacrifice as a salient feature of prevailing mystery cults. . . . While there is truth to this, it would serve us well to remember that Paul was steeped in the prevailing Jewish sanguinary cult. Which leads us to the very adventurous question: Did Moses command blood sacrifice? Since various reform movements within the religious spectrum of Mosaism, such as the little-known Rechabites and the pre-Christian “Nazaraioi,” contested the Pharisaic claim, since the Ebionite Jesus condemns the sanguinary cult centralized in the Jerusalem Temple, and since later St. Stephen was stoned to death for advancing similar criticisms, the question is far from preposterous.

If indeed Jeremiah 7:21-23 is “a slap in the face of the priestly code,” as M. Weinfeld has put it, then we must review our Bahá’í views on taḥríf. Although Bahá’u’lláh stresses that “perversion of the text” was principally interpretative, should this rule out the strong possibility that, just as in the case of Paul, corrupt interpretations of the Religion later came to be regarded as scripture?

The Ebionites had a great deal to offer toward a solution to this problem. Perhaps Udo Schaefer’s most memorable and outstanding contribution to Bahá’í thought in relation to the Christian universe is to recognize and proclaim Ebionite Christianity [Page 9] as the historical foundation upon which a Bahá’í perspective on Christ and Christianity can rest. Schaefer shows that what comes closest to a scientific approach in theological exploration is historical validation. If Paul is truly a usurper and heresiarch, it must be shown that, historically, those who were amongst the most original followers of Christ thought so—and had good reason to.

Finally, perhaps the weightiest endorsement of Schaefer’s “discovery” of Ebionite Christianity comes from some of the world’s most preëminent scholars. Together with Harris Hirschberg, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Shlomo Pines, David Flusser, James Dunn, Cardinal Danielou, and others, Professor Gilles Quispel can safely state: “the Jewish Christians or Ebionites were the legitimate heirs of primitive Christianity, whereas the New Testament to a large extent reflects the views of Gentile Christianity as defended by St. Paul and his fellows. This is the present state of scholarship” (Eranos-Jahrbuch 1969).

MARZIEH GAIL, Keene, New Hampshire: The Primacy of Peter is undeniable, but should we forget the wonderful services rendered by Paul—or these words of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: “Judas Iscariot was for a long time favored in the holy court of His Holiness Christ, yet he was entirely . . . remote; while Paul, the apostle, was in close embrace with His Holiness” (Tablets of Abdul-Baha Abbas, III, 720).

WILLIAM S. HATCHER, Quebec, Canada: I have read the several letters whose principal concern seems to be that Udo Schaefer (in his essay [The Light Shineth in Darkness]) and I (in my review of same) have contributed to propagating a distorted and unfair picture of Paul, and one that is manifestly at variance with Bahá’í teaching. Upon reflection, I feel that these reactions are based primarily on an imprecise understanding of the thesis put forth in Schaefer’s book. There are at least four logically independent questions involved in this controversy, and it is of paramount importance to recognize them and to state each explicitly. These are: (1) The question concerning what doctrines have been originated and taught by Paul, (2) the question of the authenticity of Paul’s doctrines from various viewpoints (i.e., the degree of harmony between Paul’s doctrines and Christ’s teachings or between Paul’s doctrines and Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings), (3) the question concerning the degree of influence of Pauline doctrines on the development of Christianity and on the de facto theology of various contemporary branches of it, and (4) the question of value judgments about Paul the man (his sincerity, loyalty, devotion, spirituality, etc.).

In particular, with reference to the last point, the fact that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has praised Paul the man cannot be taken alone as evidence that the Bahá’í Faith accepts all of the ideas and teachings of Paul as true. If one were to follow this logic, one would expect to see in the Bahá’í Writings praise only of those possessed of infallibility. In the light of well-known Bahá’í teachings on this subject, praise would be restricted uniquely to the Manifestations of God and their explicitly authorized interpreters. Yet we know that Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá have heaped praise on such figures as Plato and Aristotle, who taught many doctrines at variance with Bahá’í teaching.

The conditions of earthly existence, especially in past ages, have been such that it seems already a significant achievement if a person is able to influence the world more for good than for ill. If he influences the world considerably more for good than ill, this ranks as a very great achievement. A faith as universal as the [Page 10] Bahá’í Faith could hardly fail to give credit wherever credit is due; and this, or so it appears to me, is what the Authors and Interpreters of our Faith have done again and again. Their spirit has been that of seeing the good and overlooking the shortcomings, especially when they judge that the intention was sincere. When they must be negative, it is usually toward false ideas, not specific individuals (though there are, as we know, some notable and necessary exceptions). . . .

Looking, now, at the other three points, Schaefer has put forth essentially the following thesis: Paul’s teaching is focused almost entirely on a redemption doctrine (with an attendant of Christology) that he has himself synthesized out of Greek, Jewish, and Pagan elements. With respect to Jesus’ teachings this represents a significant change from Jesus’ focus on ethical conduct and individual spiritual development to a focus on mystic and occult doctrines concerning Jesus Himself and a salvation through an essentially passive act of acceptance and belief in Jesus as Risen Lord. With regard to Bahá’í teachings [Page 11] several of Paul’s doctrines (e.g., original sin and the bodily resurrection of Jesus) are explicitly denied. Others (e.g., the substitutional atonement) are given spiritual meaning through radical reinterpretation, but a meaning quite different from that understood by Paul or by Christians down through the ages. That these Pauline doctrines have substantially influenced Christian thought through the centuries is reflected in the numerous creeds, practices, and writings of Church figures many of which exhibit Pauline influence both explicitly and implicitly.

Viewed in this way (which is the way I viewed it when writing my critique of Schaefer’s work), there is very little that any Bahá’í can quarrel with in Schaefer’s discussion of Paul. Certainly his essay is not vulnerable to the criticisms contained in the present letters, most of which are non sequitur extensions and extrapolations from Schaefer’s carefully worded discussion. For example, to say that Paul’s doctrines shifted the focus of early Christianity does not mean that everything Paul taught was wrong or that everything taught by his ideological opponents was right. Similarly, rejecting Paul’s polemic against the law is not logically the same thing as affirming that the early Christians should have continued to follow Jewish law in all respects. Moreover, Schaefer has nowhere said that all of the extraneous ideas injected into Christianity are due to Paul, and it is clear that such doctrines as the trinity are much later.

I agree with the judgment of Juan Ricardo Cole (cf. his letter in WORLD ORDER, Winter 1978-79) that the positive statements about Paul in the Bahá’í Writings seem definitely to exclude considering Paul as anything like a covenant-breaker or an “antichrist.” Also, the exact nature and limits of the authority conferred on Peter are not clear. We do, however, have the definite statements of Shoghi [Page 12] Effendi that no previous religious system had a clearly defined line of authority like that of the Bahá’í Faith.

Again, I feel that Schaefer is not open to criticism on this count since he does not engage in name calling and vilification of Paul but only reports that certain other persons have held such extremely negative views of him. Of course, it would be a shame if some readers were to use Schaefer’s discussion as a basis for an emotional vilification of the work and life of Paul. It appears to me that such a reaction would be highly unlikely on the part of any thoughtful reader. But even if such an unfortunate and misguided reaction were forthcoming on the part of some readers, that in itself would not invalidate the logical points made in Schaefer’s discussion.

Somewhat more controversial, perhaps, are Schaefer’s positive judgments about so-called Nazarene Christianity. One can realize the distortions wrought by the influence of Paul’s doctrines without necessarily believing that truer doctrines were preserved elsewhere. It was not just differences with Paul with which Peter had to contend, but all of the natural inertia of the traditional attachments of the new Jewish Christians to their past. It is logically possible, and may, in fact, be the case that there was no group whatever that represented an absolutely pure expression of Jesus’ Revelation.

Perhaps Paul’s influence was useful in detaching nascent Christianity from an overreliance on Judaism. Certainly the idea of the independence of the new Revelation of Jesus from the traditional Jewish forms (“you cannot put new wine in old wineskins”) is logically independent of Paul’s redemption doctrine. Had he championed the former without the latter it would no doubt have been better. Yet we know what Christianity became with Paul. What it would have been without him we can only speculate.

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The State of the Bahá’í Community in Iran

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THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF WORLD ORDER has obtained a copy of a document published by the Human Rights Commission of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Switzerland that provides certain details of recent persecutions directed against the Bahá’ís of Iran. The particular value of the document lies in its having been issued by a federation of Protestant churches of a neutral European country. We reproduce below an English translation of the original German.

F.K.

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DECLARATION ON THE STATE OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN IRAN

In agreement with the executive committee of the federation of Protestant Churches in Switzerland, its human rights commission publishes the enclosed document on the state of the Bahá’ís in Iran.

At the beginning of July all federal parliamentarian groups appealed to the Iranian authorities to grant freedom of conscience (in German it means religious freedom K.S.) to the Bahá’ís in Iran.

At the same time, the Human Rights Commission of the Federation of Protestant Churches in Switzerland received this documentation on the situation of the Bahá’ís in Iran, with the request to publish it once notified.

End of August we were notified to proceed. Meanwhile the Iranian government has taken further actions against the Bahá’ís. Thus, at the registration, children who declare their membership in this religious community are not admitted to school. Further, 37 national Bahá’í leaders have been put on the list of those who may not leave Iran. At present their sanctuaries which are of international importance, are profaned and destroyed.

The 300,000 Christians, who mostly belong to ethnical minorities are, it seems, subjected to less important oppressions. Nevertheless their hospitals have been confiscated, correspondence courses had to be stopped and libraries were closed. The Iranian members of the Episcopal-church have been affected most.

We are aware that here it is not only a question of the rights of Bahá’ís or Christians, but of the religious freedom of minorities and the respect of the dignity of all the peoples living in Iran in general. Terrified by the persecution of the Kurds, we are publishing this document today in the hope that those personalities invested with the task of elaborating a new constitution for Iran would pay special attention to the protection of minorities and would grant religious freedom.

For the Human Rights Commission

of the Federation of Protestant

Churches in Switzerland

Hch. Rusterholz

Confidential Report on the State of the Bahá’í Community in Iran

Introduction—The Bahai Community in Iran has a tradition and history in this country dating back to 1844. During the ensuing years, members of the Community have contributed to the education and welfare of the Iranian nation and have been loyal citizens and peace-loving individuals. They are devout in conviction and belief and support the religious proposition that Bahai Believers may not participate in any political movement in Iran. They are brave and courageous. Several years ago the National Spiritual Assembly [Page 16] of the Bahais in Iran wrote a letter to the former Shah announcing they would not join his newly formed Rastakhiz national party. This was a political tool used by the former Shah to test the loyalty of his subjects and by presenting such a letter to him, the Bahais here showed genuine courage.

Recently a national referendum was held on the question of whether to form an Islamic Republic in Iran or not. The ballot had two possible answers: Yes or No. The Bahai national leadership wrote to Prime Minister Bazargan and said their religious convictions would not allow any Bahai to vote in the national referendum. Such a written statement issued during the tense days of the post-revolution fervor again exhibited the amazing courage of their convictions.

The report that follows is a collection of facts gathered by the author and presented in the belief that religious harassment of the Bahais and their faith has reached proportions which call for a concerted effort by nonaligned nations and third world media to publicize this state of affairs with the purpose of preventing further loss of property and possible loss of life to the 450,000 members of this Community here.

Method of Presentation—This report is prepared in five sections. The first three are specific areas of harassment and even persecution against the Bahais in Iran

—administrative

—financial

—personal and social

Then a prediction of the immediate future of subsequent events if the logic of past actions is followed through by Islamic actions. Finally, a request for action.

1—Administrative Strangulation—Several days after the Iranian Islamic Revolution (now dated as having begun on Sunday February 11, 1979 when the Iranian Army declared its “neutrality” and thereby caused the fall of the government) groups of unidentified gunmen systematically attacked some twenty centers of the Bahai Community in various districts of Tehran. Their method of attack was similar in all instances:

—once inside buildings and offices, they would break open drawers, filing cabinets and safes and would take away all documents, correspondence, files, books and even office equipment (such as typewriters, memo and photocopy machines).

Places attacked include the headquarters of the National Spiritual Assembly, the Tehran Spiritual Assembly Center and the Bahai District Committees’ Coordinating Center of Tehran. The City youth center for Bahai young people was occupied. Efforts were made to move the offices of the Tehran Spiritual Assembly to another area. This was done several times and on each occasion the new premises were attacked shortly after they started up work again.

Spiritual meetings and religious classes while in session suffered the same fate. Revolutionary militiamen would invade the premises of these gatherings and break them up. They acted on the excuse that reports of antirevolutionary activities were taking place. Often the religious teachers were arrested and taken away and held for several hours. On one occasion a teacher was held for several days. They were interrogated, frightened and placed under heavy psychological stress. When released, these leaders and teachers had to sign a statement pledging not to attend or promote “unauthorized or any antirevolutionary meetings”.

The membership list of Bahais in Iran was carefully guarded in registries in the National Spiritual Assembly Headquarters in Tehran. However, about two months ago these were stolen. It is assumed they are now in the hands of an ultra-conservative Moslem brotherhood called the “Tabliqat-e-Islami” (The Islamic Propaganda Group). During the past month two separate letters—put in the context of polite yet firm language—have been mailed out to many of the Tehran Bahai Community at their home addresses and specifically addressed to them by name. This indicates that the sender has the list. This anti-Bahai correspondence “invites” the [Page 17] Bahai to convert to Islam.

About 75,000 of the estimated 450,000 Bahais in Iran live in the greater Tehran area. It is not known how many of these have received this hate mail.

(For comparison’s sake, there are about 60,000 Jews, 20,000 Zoroastrians and 300,000 Christians in Iran today.)

It seems that the obvious purpose of this harassment is to paralyze the administration of the Bahai Community in Iran.

2—Financial Strangulation—The Bahais of Iran have formed a commercial company called Sherkat Omana (The Trustees’ Company). In early June a letter from the Bonyad Mostaz’a’fan (The Foundation For the Dispossessed) directed an employee of this organization to take whatever action necessary in determining the identification and verification of the place and purpose of the Sherkat Omana. The reason for this directive was that the Sherkat Omana had been officially confiscated by the direct order of the National Iranian Islamic Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Under the present Islamic system of government, the phrase “confiscated properties” connotes those properties which belonged to criminals in Iran executed for crimes against humanity and corruption on earth OR whose leaders stand accused of usury.

A sub-section of the “Foundation For The Dispossessed” is called “The Department of Confiscated Properties” and it is this subsection which officially took over the Sherkat Omana.

When the offices of the Sherkat Omana were occupied by representatives of the Foundation, all employees were called together into one large room. One by one each was interrogated in front of the whole group. They were accused of being guilty of the following:

—Bahais are agents of Zionism

—Bahais are collaborators with Israel

—Bahais have been identified as composing over half the known staff of torturers in SAVAK

—Bahais lived under the protection of SAVAK

The manager of the company was ordered to hand over the keys to all strong boxes, safes and locked files. Then he was commanded to appoint a person to take representatives of the Foundation to each piece of property that is owned by the Sherkat Omana. This person is now being forced to show all Bahai properties (one by one) to the Foundation Representative. This investigation is being carried out based on the ownership documents found in the Sherkat Omana.

All assets and furnishings of the Company were taken over by these men from the Foundation. All employees of the Company were summarily dismissed on that day and told not to come back to work for any reason.

The sobering meaning of this act is that all income producing property plus buildings and land used solely for Bahai religious purposes are being taken over by the Islamic government of Iran. A list of some of these properties and the extent to which the act of confiscation has been completed as of the date of this report is as follows:

1—Cemeteries—Many Bahai cemeteries in Iran have been taken over during the month of June by the Foundation. In those places where this has happened, the question is, “Where will Bahais be allowed to be buried?” Bahai population figures indicate that an average of two Bahais die of natural causes every day in Iran.

2—National Headquarters—Recently the National Spiritual Assembly’s Headquarters in Tehran was taken over.

3—Youth Center—Within the last several weeks the city-wide Bahai Youth Center located in a beautiful walled-in garden was confiscated.

4—Recreation Center—A large piece of open, yet walled-in property in the foothills in north Tehran and covering some four million square meters of land (988 acres or one and a half square miles) was occupied at rifle point by revolutionary guards in early [Page 18] June. The name of this property was changed to that of a leading Moslem prophet and has been declared to be the Central Headquarters for the Training of Islamic Revolutionary Guards in Tehran.

5—Hospital—The only medical facility in all Iran that is affiliated with the Bahais was served notice in mid-June by the Foundation that its property had been confiscated. An investigative committee from the Foundation has been probing daily into the affairs of the hospital and last week forced the leadership of the hospital to relinquish signatory powers of all bank accounts and therefore all financial authority is in the hands of the Foundation for all hospital accounts. The Foundation has not yet closed the hospital. One reason may be that it is one of the finest charity hospitals in Tehran and contributed over one million tumans (US $135,000) worth of free medical care to the injured and wounded during the height of the revolution.

6—Sherkat Nownahallan (The Children’s Company). This investment company was taken over in early June by representatives of the Foundation.

This company is a completely Bahai owned organization. It was founded in 1917 as a company to encourage Bahai children to begin life by being thrifty and saving a little of their allowances each month for the future. This Company got its name from this program. At that time each share was five shahis (about fifty US cents) and the company had capital assets of three thousand rials (about five thousand US dollars).

Today the company’s shares are one hundred rials each (US $1.50) and there are now about 15,000 shareholders. The vast majority are Bahais with some few Moslems and Christians participating. The company has a working capital of two billion rials (thirty million US dollars) and is divided into three parts:

1—1,200 million rials—deposits by shareholders.

2—400 million rials—shares in banks and insurance companies.

3—400 million rials—paid up capital.

No one person as a shareholder has a controlling interest in the company.

Fifty percent of the equity of this company is held by the Bahai Community (this includes many of the local Bahai assemblies in cities and villages over Iran—as many as five hundred assemblies altogether). The other fifty percent is held by individual shareholders who are mostly Bahai children or who started saving there as a child and now as adults continue with the plan.

The importance of this company for the Bahais is twofold:

1—It is one of the main financial centers for the Bahai Community in Iran. With the confiscation of this company the work of the Bahai Community over Iran will be paralyzed.

2—Because most of the shareholders and depositors of this company are Bahai and many have put most of—if not all of—their savings for the future into this organization, the personal loss to thousands of Bahais is incalculable.

When this company was taken over, the revolutionary guards told the officials that this company was being confiscated because it was anti-Islamic and was participating in the field of financial credit which rightly belongs only to recognized and registered banks in Iran. Also it was said that the company was guilty of collecting funds in the form of usury.

Although the company has been taken over, all shares are still in circulation and the representatives of the Foundation are saying that they will continue to be so until such time as the Central Committee of the Foundation decides on the best use of the company’s assets and profits.

If the present progression of events continues it is anticipated that with the confiscation of these facilities by the Islamic authorities, the Bahai Community in Iran will be deprived of every vestige of property all over the nation.

3—Social and Personal Strangulation—It is estimated that there are now about twenty [Page 19] Bahais in Qasr Prison in Tehran. It is believed that all these Bahais were arrested on trumped up charges, all of which omitted any reference to their being Bahai. The pretext being used against these Bahais in prison includes the following:

—being a former senior Iranian military officer

—being a large land owner

—being an extraordinarily wealthy person

—being a former high ranking civil servant

There is also personal economic repression. A businessman was arrested in the middle of the night and was later released after he had “volunteered to contribute” two million rials (thirty thousand US dollars) to the Revolutionary Central Committee. As far as is known, none of the three hundred plus men executed under the Islamic Revolutionary Regime has been Bahai.

Photocopies of “Letters of Termination of Employment” from Iranian government agencies are on file with Bahai officials in Tehran showing clearly that at least fifty Bahais—men and women—have been openly dismissed from government service since the revolution because they are believers in the Bahai Faith. Letters of complaint have been sent to Imam Khomeini and the Prime Minister’s Office but these have not even been acknowledged.

A leading Moslem Ayatollah has stated that Bahais are people whom Moslems may annihilate without fear of punishment.

Records in the files of the National Headquarters of the Bahá’ís of Iran show that in twenty-eight locations in Iran, Bahais have been forced to deny their faith. They include the following:

1—Before the Revolution—Shiraz, Marv Dasht, Abadeh and Bushire.

2—After the Revolution—Miandoab, Hessar, Namagh (in Khorassan), Maragheh and surrounding villages and Hamadan and surrounding villages.

The proposed constitution of Iran does not recognize the Bahai faith as a legitimate religious body in the New Islamic Republic. They will have no rights of personal status if it is approved. This means they must deny their faith in order to get married, divorced, distribute inheritances and estates and in adopting children because they must pretend to be somebody else to do these acts. The reason? These four acts of personal status are religious acts which must be done according to the rules of one of the four recognized religions of the country—of which The Bahai Faith is not included.

Some religious leaders of the Islamic Faith have been asked why the Bahais were not mentioned in the proposed constitution. One answer has been that since there are so few Bahais in the country, it is useless to designate as legitimate such an insignificant minority. This is said about the largest of the four religious minorities in Iran!!

Some conservative and fanatical Moslem leaders call Bahais apostates because Bahais believe that Bahaullah represents a manifestation of God after the prophet Mohammed. A minority of Moslems accuse Bahais of saying that the Hidden Imam—Mehdi—has returned in form of Bab. In this latter context an Ayatollah has announced that on the 15th of Sha’aban (July 10, 1979 which is the birthday of the 12th or Hidden Imam of Shiite Islam) he will personally celebrate the birthday of Mehdi in the Hasee-ra-tol-qods (Holy Garden) of the Bahais in Shiraz. If this offensive gesture is indeed carried out by this Ayatollah it would be symbolically important because of the early life of Bab in Shiraz and would exhibit contempt by this Moslem cleric for the Bahai faith.

Several weeks ago in Meshed two of the leading Ayatollahs announced with great fanfare that twenty-five Bahai centers had been discovered in that city and were raided and “cleansed” by revolutionary guards. In reality, the “twenty five” centers included two Bahai centers and twenty-three homes of prominent members of the Bahai community in Meshed. The homes have been returned to their owners but the two centers have been turned into Islamic study organizations. Why were these Bahais facilities in Meshed raided? The [Page 20] newspaper wrote that Bahais are “spies for the USSR, the USA, the UK and Israel”!!

Based on past experience there is great concern by Bahai leadership in Iran that the month of Ramadan (the Moslem month of day-time fasting in Islam which this year falls between July 26 and August 23, 1979) may produce great suffering among Bahais over Iran.

There is fear based on the confiscation of Bahai property and funds that the next logical step will be further to openly and aggressively seek the involuntary conversion of Bahais to Islam.

4—The Future—It is felt that two steps might be taken by Islamic authorities in the near future against Bahais.

a—One may best be described by the Persian expression namad-mali or pressing the felt. This is an illustration taken from the making of felt from loose hairs of fur or wool. They are heated and then by heavy pressure are slowly flattened out until smooth. Such action might include the freezing of personal and privately owned Bahai assets or even their confiscation.

b—The next and more serious step would be the prohibition of any Bahai gathering for any reason which would mean that the Bahais would have to go underground or emigrate from Iran under the threat of arrest or worse.

5—A Request—It is requested that news media be apprised of these facts and this information.

—That the media be asked to publish in their outlets, the dangers that confront the Bahais in Iran.

—That the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations be notified of what has happened and that this matter be introduced to the United Nations through a neutral or third world nation.

I believe that this is the most serious time in the history of the Bahai Community in Iran. I believe that unless immediate steps are taken through appropriate channels that there is a real and present danger to a group of faithful disciples of the religion of Bahaullah.

I invite members of neutral or the third world press to come and to investigate and publicize to the world the condition of Bahais in Iran.

This matter cannot wait. I request your aid in understanding the urgency TODAY.

July ’79

[Page 21]

To Move the World

The Early Years of Louis Gregory

BY GAYLE MORRISON

AT THE HEART of the most challenging issue for the American Bahá’í community —the problem of obliterating racial prejudice—stands Louis George Gregory. A highly regarded teacher, writer, and lecturer throughout the first half of the century, and the first black to serve on the national administrative body of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada, Louis Gregory is a major historical figure. Few blacks of his era were ever elected or appointed repeatedly to positions of national leadership, in organizations with a white majority. None worked more tirelessly for the removal of racial prejudice. In fact, the words of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Cause, detailing the “ceaseless exertions,” “sacrifices, care and vigilance,” “moral courage and fortitude,” “tact and sympathy” that the solution of the racial problem in America requires apply exactly to Louis Gregory’s remarkable spirit and actions.

The source of these qualities, Shoghi Effendi also indicates, is ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son and chosen successor of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá constantly taught by word and by example the fundamental Bahá’í principle of the oneness of humanity. He found in Louis Gregory a willing pupil—thoughtful, well-educated, articulate, humble, bridging in his own upbringing the formidable chasm of legal and de facto segregation that separated black and white Americans in his day. Although Louis Gregory was neither the first nor intellectually the most outstanding of his race to become a Bahá’í in America in the early years, his role cannot be overemphasized. Wherever he went, with whomever he was, however deeply he was concerned with the universal view, he never allowed anyone to forget his particular commitment to the cause of interracial unity. Through all the years of waxing and waning enthusiasm for this principle within the young Bahá’í community itself, through all the years of segregation and lynchings and race riots in American society as a whole, he sounded the theme of racial amity with patience, good humor, and absolutely unshakable conviction. Both because of his own exceptional personality and because of the awesome achievements ‘Abdu’l-Bahá called from him, Louis Gregory deserves to be recognized as the touchstone of the principle of oneness in American Bahá’í history.

[Page 22] By his own account Louis Gregory first “met” ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in Washington, D.C., at a Bahá’í meeting he attended “only to humor the fancy of a dear old friend.” Although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was still a religious prisoner in Palestine, His presence was reflected in the handful of Bahá’ís gathered together on that “cold, dark, stormy night” late in 1907. Among them were Lua Getsinger, the speaker, who was one of the first American Bahá’ís and a member of the first group of Western pilgrims to visit ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in the Holy Land in 1898, and Pauline Hannen, a white Southerner who, along with her husband Joseph, was to become Mr. Gregory’s teacher and friend. “The light they unfolded,” he wrote of his period of study with the Hannens, “was so wonderful that for about a year we sat in dumb amazement, listening to their patient, loving talks, not knowing whether to advance or retreat, yet held by supernal power.”

When the Hannens received permission in 1909 to join the rapidly growing stream of pilgrims visiting ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, recently freed after nearly a lifetime as a prisoner of the Ottoman government, Mr. Gregory retreated into other concerns. “As they were my sole connection with the Faith,” he wrote of this period,

my interest waned during their absence. A long time afterwards I learned that they had kindly mentioned me to the Master who had instructed them to continue teaching me, assuring them that I would become a believer and an advocate of the teachings. Upon their return they remade the connection. Through the very unusual kindness of these dear friends my mental veils were cleared away and the light of assurance mercifully appeared within when they had taught me . . . how to pray.

Behind the “veils” he found the shining reality of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the exemplification of Bahá’í ideals, beckoning to him. “At length,” he recalled, “as the lesson of humility took effect and every hope vanished save the Will of God, Abdu’l Baha . . . revealed himself.” Thus Louis Gregory became, in his own words, “a confirmed believer” in the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh around the first of June 1909.

One of his first actions as a Bahá’í was to confront the challenging issue of racial prejudice as it affected the partially segregated Bahá’í community of Washington, D.C. He found that he had stepped from the radiance of the Hannens’ home into a twilight where traditional racial attitudes remained unexamined and the principles his teachers lived by were as yet imperfectly applied.

During my early days of investigation I rarely attended a meeting but went to the home of the Hannens where my friends and I were always welcome. As soon as I became a believer and began to teach, however, my colored friends got on my back and began to press me with troublous questions. If this were a New religion which stood for unity, why were its devotees divided? Why did they not meet altogether in one place? Were the Baha’is not full of prejudice like other people?

Lacking any satisfactory answers, he asked the Hannens if he might discuss the problem with them.

If you are not busy on Saturday evening, I want to have a talk with you and have a clear understanding in regard to the attitude of the local assembly [i.e., community] toward the colored believers. It is with sincere regret that I find it necessary to bring this matter up, and only because [Page 23] some impressions are going abroad which I fear will injure our Cause both among white and colored.

I have nothing to complain of that is of a personal nature. But Abdul Baha has said that slight differences now may be great differences hereafter. And for this reason I do not wish the awful responsibility of being the cause or occasion of any schism to rest upon my shoulders.

The Hannens explained that “the matter had never come up” in the community and arranged for him to consult the “Working Committee” or local executive body.

There is apparently no record of that meeting, and no immediate steps were taken to begin integrated meetings that year, but the act of consulting with the Working Committee may have strengthened Mr. Gregory’s appreciation of the need to work within the community to effect change. In any case, it neither dampened his enthusiasm nor his desire to share the Bahá’í teachings with others. In July he sent Joseph and Pauline Hannen a note of gratitude for their role in leading him to the Faith.

It comes to me that I have never taken occasion to thank you specifically for all your kindness and patience, which finally culminated in my acceptance of the great truths of the Bahai Revelation. It has given me an entirely new conception of Christianity and of all religion, and with it my whole nature seems changed for the better. . . . It is a sane and practical religion, which meets all the varying needs of life, and I hope I shall ever regard it as a priceless possession.

In order to share this “priceless possession” with others, he continued, he hoped to arrange a “large scale” Bahá’í meeting, which as many as fifteen hundred people might be expected to attend. It would be held in the fall under the auspices of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association, a Negro organization of which he was president.

Another of Mr. Gregory’s first actions as a Bahá’í, was to write to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, as was the practice of that time. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s reply, received in November 1909, expressed not only hopes for spiritual development, which were customary in all of His letters, but extraordinary expectations regarding Louis Gregory’s singular role in race relations. Without doubt recognizing the qualities of uncompromising forthrightness and tactful leadership that Mr. Gregory had already demonstrated in his first few months of membership, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá told him:

I hope that thou mayest become . . . the means whereby the white and colored people shall close their eyes to racial differences and behold the reality of humanity, and that is the universal unity which is the oneness of the kingdom of the human race, the basic harmony of the world and the appearance of the bounty of the Almighty. In brief, do thou not look upon . . . thy limited capacity; look thou upon the Bounties and Providence of the Lord of the Kingdom, for His Confirmation is great, and His Power unparalleled and incomparable. Rely as much as thou canst upon the True One, and be thou resigned to the Will of God, so that like unto a candle thou mayest by enkindled in the world of humanity and like unto a star thou mayest shine and gleam from the Horizon of Reality and become the cause of the guidance of both races.

For Louis Gregory any hope of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s was to be regarded as an injunction. In 1909, at the age of thirty-five, he turned his back on a secure economic position as a [Page 24] lawyer within the small elite of black professionals, directing increasing degrees of attention to a new unpaid calling. For the rest of his long life he put his Bahá’í activities foremost, finally abandoning his profession altogether to become a “racial amity worker,” as he often referred to himself, usually earning only a bare subsistence, devoting himself to the self-imposed demands of his work: constant travel, writing, and lecturing in the cause of racial unity.

He brought to his task the insight into oppression of a Southern black, born during the era of Reconstruction, coming to maturity as the promise of civil rights gave way to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement. But his upbringing also prepared him to build bridges of racial understanding. In his experience whites were not simply the oppressors; they were also his forebears, playmates, teachers, and friends. In short, he gained as a child both a keen sense of the injustices his people continued to face and an understanding that whites were, in a broader sense, his people too.

LOUIS GREGORY was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 6 June 1874, during a time of unprecedented hope for supporters of equal civil rights for blacks. South Carolina, one of two states where blacks outnumbered whites, saw blacks achieve their greatest success in exercising the new freedoms of the Reconstruction period. Among all the former Confederate states, only South Carolina had a black majority in the constitutional convention called to reconstruct civil government for all its people. Denounced by white conservatives, the convention nonetheless produced what has been called “the state’s first really democratic constitution,” a document that continued in force long after the conservatives had regained control of the government. South Carolina was the only state in which blacks predominated in even one of the houses of the legislature. Their dominance in the lower house gave them considerable power in the government; they did not control it, however, since the governor and most of the senate were white. A number of blacks served ably in various high offices. In 1874 South Carolina’s state treasurer was Francis L. Cardozo, a free-born native of Charleston, educated at the University of Glasgow and the London School of Theology; he had already served as secretary of state from 1868 to 1872. Six blacks represented the state in the United States House of Representatives.

A beginning at least had been made to involve blacks in the body politic and to provide them with opportunities for education. Their position was strengthened temporarily by the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited the exclusion of blacks from juries and from public accommodations, such as trains, hotels, and theaters. Yet by denying them land or any compensation for their years of servitude, Reconstruction failed to put the former slaves on a secure economic footing. Considering their disabilities—economic dependence, lack of education, and fierce opposition by white supremacists— blacks responded amazingly well to the challenges of citizenship. But social justice eluded them. They were blamed for the weaknesses of the Reconstruction governments; especially in South Carolina, opponents attributed every failing to “black rule.” Almost no one at that time or for the next half century pointed out that blacks neither ruled nor were responsible for the prevailing conditions that finally destroyed the so-called radical experiment in South Carolina: illiteracy and political ignorance among the population of both races in the state, social and economic dislocation throughout the South, and widespread opportunism and political corruption in the nation as a whole. The easier course was to pronounce Reconstruction a failure and in so doing to discredit racial equality.

During Louis Gregory’s early childhood the limited gains made by blacks in the face of pervasive bias and intimidation were being [Page 25] eroded on every side. By 1877 Northern politicians who had supported Reconstruction, without ever committing themselves fully to the transformation of the South, had lost interest or become disillusioned by slow progress and tales of corruption and misrule. The result was the Compromise of 1877: the Republican administration withdrew federal troops, thereby abandoning blacks and radicals to those who had fought to save the old order. Yet the traditionalist white majority in the South was not uniformly racist; its views, often reflecting class attitudes, ranged from paternalism to implacable bigotry. Nor was it unanimously opposed to some degree of freedom for blacks. C. Vann Woodward has described this period as an “unstable interlude” during which “the old heritage of slavery and the new and insecure heritage of legal equality” coexisted, continuing “to overlap as they had during Reconstruction.” Southern cities like Charleston remained residentially integrated, as they always had been —unlike Northern cities, where ghettos were the rule. Some public facilities remained segregated by custom, as they always had been. To these paradoxical relations between the races in the South—their intimacy conditioned by the reciprocities of the master/slave relationship—had been added a profoundly new element of freedom that could not be ignored. “The laws were still on the books,” Woodward observes, “and the whites had learned some measure of accommodation. Negroes still voted in large numbers, held numerous elective and appointive offices, and appealed to the courts with hope for redress of grievances.” In short, even after 1877, “alternatives were still open and real choices had to be made.”

But the inroads against freedom were substantial, nonetheless. Put in harsher terms, the years following the Compromise of 1877 saw “the unimpeded development of a race system that supplanted the old institution of slavery as a mechanism of social control.” In 1883 the Supreme Court found the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to be unconstitutional, thus setting the matter outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. Jim Crow transportation laws gradually spread through a large part of the South. South Carolina, which had held out against Jim Crow for some time, capitulated in 1898; soon both waiting rooms and first- and second-class coaches were segregated. Meanwhile, the movement to disfranchise blacks had also begun. Clearly, whites had made their choice, which they came to regard as permanent: the races were to be rigidly separated, and as far as possible blacks were to be denied the rights of citizenship.

Woodward ascribes the adoption of this attitude of “extreme racism” to “a relaxation of the opposition”—consisting of the moderating forces of “Northern liberalism, Southern conservatism, and Southern radicalism”— rather than to any philosophical conversion. In his view:

All the elements of fear, jealousy, proscription, hatred, and fanaticism had long been present, as they are present in various degrees of intensity in any society. What enabled them to rise to dominance was not so much cleverness or ingenuity as it was a general weakening and discrediting of the numerous forces that had hitherto kept them in check.

The result in South Carolina, where blacks had wielded considerable influence, was the same as in states where they had achieved little: human rights were denied to people of color. Extreme racism was to remain triumphant throughout Louis Gregory’s long life, and Southern segregation began to yield to major challenges only after his death.

Louis grew up in the turbulent last quarter [Page 26] of the nineteenth century, experiencing a full measure of its pain and its promise. His mother, freed at fourteen, had managed to obtain a little education before marrying and giving birth to two sons. When Louis was small (five, according to one account), his father, Ebenezer George, died of tuberculosis. Louis remembered little of his early life, shadowed first by his father’s illness and death, then by poverty and even hunger as his mother struggled to support her family. Perhaps the sustaining force in this period was Louis’ maternal grandmother, a formidable woman who, though virtually illiterate, schooled him in dignity, courage, and the love of laughter. As an adult he told affectionately of his grandmother’s “native abilities” and practical knowledge of medicine, gained as a nurse on the plantation, and especially of her “very keen sense of humor.” She was, he recalled, “the only person that I have ever known who could make me laugh beyond all control.” The sense of humor she nurtured in Louis served to lighten many difficulties in the years ahead and became a valuable asset in his racial amity work. “If the walls of caste are ever to be shattered,” he wrote toward the end of his life, “laughter . . . will be no small power in such a change.” His grandmother’s hilarious stories about life on the plantation helped to make bearable both the memory of slavery and the difficulties that came with emancipation.

Louis’ mother and grandmother had been slaves on the plantation of George Washington Dargan in Darlington, South Carolina. Their stories of Chancellor Dargan and his family held particular significance because, in Louis’ words, “My grandmother, wholly of African blood, was without ceremony his slave wife and my mother his daughter.” Dargan had died in 1859, and all connections with the family had ended after Louis’ grandmother and mother left the plantation at the end of the war. But their stories gave Louis a certain pride in the Dargan family and a particular regard for one Louise Dargan, whom he identified as the Chancellor’s wife, for teaching his mother and grandmother “the kind of religion which involved the mystery of a change of heart and putting of ideals into action.”

With characteristic dignity, Louis Gregory rejected bitterness over manifold wrongs of the past. Instead, he chose from the ambiguities of his descent a birthright of which he could be proud.

The Dargan family are outstanding and distinguished for their work in the field of religion and education. They accepted the end of slavery cheerfully and stimulated the progress and enlightenment of humanity. I did not choose them as my forebears, but in justice must acknowledge my obligations to them.

Undoubtedly his grandmother’s generous spirit helped to shape his attitude toward the white relatives from whom he was separated by insurmountable barriers of caste.

A postscript to the story of Louis Gregory’s white forebears illuminates the ironies of the Southern way of life, for both blacks and whites. At the age of seventy-four, when he was no longer able to travel widely and had turned more attention to his literary projects, Mr. Gregory wrote to the postmaster of Darlington, South Carolina, for information on the Dargan family. His letter was referred to a lawyer, George Dargan, the grandson of one of Chancellor Dargan’s brothers. On 8 February 1949 Dargan wrote a warm and informative response to the cultivated inquirer from Maine (“Dear Mr. Gregory”), enclosing a copy of the family tree. George Washington Dargan had been a judge in the South Carolina Court of Equity, his grandnephew wrote. Among his brothers had been a lawyer, three physicians, and an army officer who was killed in the [Page 27] Civil War. The identity of “Louise Dargan” remained something of a mystery, as the Chancellor’s wife was named Mary Adeline; quite possibly she was a Louise Wilson, who had married one of the Dargan brothers and been widowed in 1854.

As no copies of Mr. Gregory’s letters are to be found in his papers, one can only speculate on his reply, but it seems to have sparked an adverse reaction. He soon received a second letter from Dargan, brief, barely polite, and widely divergent in tone from the first.

Dear Sir:

I thank you for your letter of the 20th and the papers enclosed therewith, which I have read with interest.

I think that the promotion of harmonious relations between the white and colored people of the South has been greatly retarded by political demagogues and agitators, both North and South.

Yours very truly,

Geo. E. Dargan

Nearly a century after Chancellor Dargan had formed a liaison with his slave, walls of illusion continued to shield many Southern whites from real understanding of themselves and of their past. Rather than face the truth, they sought to reinforce the barriers of caste and to deny the indisputable ties between the races, above all ties of flesh and blood.

In earlier days, however, the strictures of caste were enforced by extreme means. Even the slightest evidences of material success by a black after the Civil War were sometimes seen as an affront to the white man. Among the stories Louis heard from his grandmother was her account of how the Ku Klux Klan had killed his grandfather. A blacksmith who had prospered after the war, he had bought a mule and a horse. Because of this “display of luxury” the Klan rode up one night, called him out of his house, and shot him. Her life hung in the balance while they debated whether to kill her too. Then they rode away. With great courage, Louis Gregory’s grandmother had refused either to hate or to be put in her place, the two most predictable responses to terrorism. Her final answer to the night riders was to raise a grandson who, like her, could not be intimidated.

The stabilizing influence of his grandmother helped the family through a time of deep poverty and hardship. Louis’ prospects were limited, nevertheless, until his mother remarried. “During my early childhood,” he wrote of this decisive change in his life, “my mother married George Gregory who became a real father to me so that by his earnest wish I took his name, becoming Louis George Gregory.” The close relationship established between young Louis and his stepfather continued until George Gregory died in 1929, at the age of eighty-seven. Both the moderate habits that prolonged his life and the spirit that pervaded it impressed his stepson, who eulogized him thus: “On the basis of merit and good humor he was highly respected and honored by a large circle of friends among both races.”

In addition to emotional security George Gregory provided the family with increased economic well-being and a heritage of freedom that his stepson regarded with pride.

He was free born and his family were property holders in the days before the Civil War. The year-book for 1849 of Charleston shows that free people of color possessed around $400,000 in property and oddly enough, 14 slaves. He was not only not a slave-holder, but [was] a zealous advocate of freedom for all men.

Moreover, during the Civil War he had joined the Union ranks, becoming one of a number of blacks from South Carolina who fought against the Confederacy.

Having been free from birth and educated to some degree, George Gregory [Page 28] helped his wife and children obtain advantages that society would otherwise have denied them. After their marriage, his wife gained, in her son’s words, “a taste for good literature and some knowledge of music.” The Gregory family was precisely the sort—“a more than ordinarily disciplined and stable family, and . . . one that was literate, as well” —that sociologists claim tended to produce a generation of black scholars and professionals. Gregory made sacrificial efforts to provide Louis with the best education possible in Charleston, later assuring that he had a trade by apprenticing him to a tailor and also paying for his first year at college. Thus from his stepfather, as well as from his mother and grandmother, he learned the qualities necessary to overcome a black man’s humiliating lot in racism’s revanchist era: self-respect, love of learning, assurance, dignity, resourcefulness, and a sense of humor.

Despite the South’s problems, Louis Gregory grew up with a deep love for the region. He remembered Charleston in his boyhood as a gracious old city where “courtesy seemed the primal virtue and there was less friction between the races than appeared in many other cities.” Yet the advantages Charleston offered a black child were at least as much the result of changes brought about by the Civil War and Reconstruction as of the city’s traditions of cosmopolitanism and culture. Louis’ earliest playmates included the children of white Northern troops stationed in the South after the War, and with them came perhaps his first experiences of interracial amity. Throughout his youth, streetcars and some other public facilities were open to everyone; as late as 1898 conservative Charleston newspaper editors argued that Jim Crow laws were unnecessary, and if a separate car were indeed desirable, it would be best used to segregate drunken, white ruffians from respectable people of either color. Above all, Louis Gregory’s generation was the first, black or white, to grow up in South Carolina with the right to a public education—one right that, although it was neither regarded with enthusiasm nor supported on an equal basis, was not taken away completely when the white supremacists “redeemed” the Southern way of life.

In practice, schools were segregated, even during Reconstruction, and black schools were inadequate from the start. “Without exception the segregated schools were inferior,” August Meier and Elliott Rudwick have written, “and failed to give Negroes even the rudiments of an adequate education.” Louis Gregory’s description of his public school years indicates an experience probably better than the norm, but his respect for his white teachers was tempered by awareness of the awkward relationship between them and their pupils:

My teachers in the Charleston public schools were southern whites. The principal of the Simonton school was an ex-Confederate [sic] soldier. He was a graduate of the College of Charleston, a fine disciplinarian and highly polished gentleman who loved his task and did it well. Likewise efficient were the teachers who served with him and well trained for their tasks. Many expressions of gratitude went out to them from former pupils. . . . Later the time came, none too early, when the colored people were engaged by the Board of Education to man their own schools.

[Page 29] Thus public school was at best a proving ground for a black child, taught by a staff that was “efficient” and “well trained,” guided by a principal who “loved his task and did it well” (the professionalism of these Southern whites apparently triumphing over an ingrained antipathy to the idea of blacks as fully educable beings). The best that could be said was that such feelings were not universal. As Louis Gregory put it:

I cannot recall a time when at least some whites of the South could not be found who were willing for the colored race to have every right and opportunity, on the basis of merit, which they themselves enjoyed. That minority has grown with the passing years and that it will become a majority ere long is as certain as the sun rise.

Louis passed the test of public education, going on to attend private schools founded and supported by Northern church groups and philanthropists to reach “‘the talented tenth’ of the Negro race, who might through liberal education become leaders for the masses.” In these schools his teachers were, rather than simply dedicated professionals, dedicated humanists who accepted pay far lower than they could have earned in the North because they believed in their ideals. He remembered them as having been deeply affected spiritually by “the great revivals which swept the world around the middle of the last century”—a religious matrix from which came abolitionists, feminists, and champions of the rights of oppressed peoples.

The first private school Louis attended was Avery Institute in Charleston, a black secondary school run by the American Missionary Association. Francis L. Cardozo had been its first principal, and its students were “upper class and aspiring Charleston children.” After graduating in 1891, Louis enrolled at Fisk University, the outstanding institution of higher education established in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, by the American Missionary Association. His stepfather supported him financially during his first year at Fisk. Subsequently, he paid his own way, winning scholarships and earning extra money, a friend recalled, by “cleaning, pressing and tailoring for the students, and sometimes working as a waiter during the summer vacations.” After he received his degree in 1896, he returned to Charleston to teach at Avery Institute.

The magnitude of Louis Gregory’s educational accomplishments, which his bachelor’s degree in itself represented, is perhaps best illustrated statistically. In 1900 there were about nine million blacks in the United States. Only about two thousand—or two hundredths of one percent—had graduated from colleges and universities, primarily from thirty-four “Negro colleges,” and only about seven hundred were enrolled in that year. The percentage of people educated at the best black schools, like Avery and Fisk, was much smaller. Opportunities for graduate or professional education were even more limited. Very few black colleges offered advanced degrees, and no white schools in the South accepted black graduate students. When Louis Gregory decided to study law, the outstanding law school open to substantial numbers of blacks was at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

This choice of profession entailed leaving the South, not only for a period of study but for the indefinite future. Virtually no openings for black lawyers existed there because, [Page 30] as one scholar has observed, “the disfranchisement of the Negro throughout the South and the subsequent denigration of the Negro’s stature in public life sharply curtailed opportunities for the entry of Negroes into the legal profession in the section.” Louis Gregory received his LL.B. degree in March 1902; and after being admitted to the bar, he and another young lawyer, James A. Cobb, opened a law office in Washington, D.C. Their partnership ended in 1906, when Mr. Gregory took a position with the U.S. Treasury Department. The men remained close, however. Cobb, who was appointed judge of the District of Columbia municipal court in 1926, wrote after his old friend’s death:

“I knew him as a student, teacher, practicing lawyer, lecturer and friend, and in each capacity he was strong and outstanding. In other words he was a fine student, a lovely character and a person with a great mind which he devoted to the betterment of mankind. . . . those with whom he came in contact were and are better for their association with him. In fact, he was one of those who enriched the life of America.”

AT THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT Louis Gregory’s ability to form close relationships led him into an extraordinary friendship with two colleagues. “There were two fellow clerks, white and very elderly, occupying with me the same room, with my desk between theirs,” he wrote many years later. He described them as being “in striking contrast one to the other” in all but age.

One was a Massachusetts Yankee and one-armed veteran of the Civil War. He was not highly educated, but had a keen mind, was efficient in his work and a fine representative of the yeomanry of his state with its traditions of justice and freedom. My other companion was a Marylander, a man of culture, graduate of a New England college, well read in literature, history, and current events, but intensely Southern in his sympathies and outlook on life.

These three disparate individuals—divided by age, race, and background—“frequently relieved the routine by animated discussions.” Mr. Gregory admitted to having enjoyed the “pastime” of sparking some of the more lively arguments after he found that “any question about the Civil War, innocently enough asked by me, would bring them into verbal conflict.” Despite their differences, however, the three men became close; “They were both to me warm personal friends such as I hope never to forget in time or eternity.” Mr. Gregory was particularly impressed at having been invited to the Southern gentleman’s home to meet his wife, a courtesy unprecedented in his experience.

For his part Mr. Gregory showed trust in his friends by using them as a sounding board for his ideas. He was at that time, as one might expect, preoccupied with the problems of race relations. As a representative of the “talented tenth” of his race, a graduate of two of the most outstanding institutions of higher education for blacks, a resident in the national capital, and a trained lawyer whose profession made him keenly aware of political movements, Louis Gregory was in a position both to observe the forces affecting his people and to become involved in movements for change.

From the 1890s on, he had seen the steady progress of efforts to disfranchise blacks in the South, accelerated especially after the collapse of the Populist movement, which had briefly demonstrated a potential for uniting blacks and poor whites as political allies. Blacks were denied not only the right to vote but even the protection of the law. From 1884 to 1900 there had been in the United [Page 31] States more than twenty-five hundred lynchings, mostly of blacks and mostly in the South. During the Spanish-American War black soldiers had been abused by Southern whites who regarded a black man with a gun and a uniform as an affront to their social order and a patent danger. The coming of a new century, which many people believed would bring an end to the bloodshed, simply brought changing patterns of violence. Lynchings continued, to be sure; one hundred blacks were lynched in the first year of the century, eleven hundred by 1914. But terrorism against blacks was also vented in what John Hope Franklin has called an “epidemic of race riots that swept the country early in the century.” These riots, unlike those of later years in which blacks took part in the violence, were virtual pogroms. The Atlanta race riot of September 1906 was perhaps the South’s most striking example of such “organized brigandage of life and property.” The normal life of the city came to a complete halt for days as mobs of whites, their hatred fanned by an election that focused upon the issue of disfranchisement, attacked blacks and destroyed their property. The promise of the new century remained unfulfilled in the North as well. “Rioting in the North,” Franklin has observed, “was as vicious and almost as prevalent as in the South.” Public outrage over such attacks was undercut by the popularity and respectability of racist theories during the heyday of imperialism and white racial superiority.

The election of Theodore Roosevelt as president in 1900 had at first led blacks to expect some improvements in the racial policies of the federal government. They had hailed him as the first president since Lincoln to offer them the hope of equal treatment. Shortly after taking office Roosevelt had invited Booker T. Washington, who had become a prominent and respected figure nationally, to the White House and had dined with him there. This gesture was regarded by blacks as a hand outstretched in friendship and by white racists as a slap in the face. Although even Southern whites generally approved of Washington, it was because they saw his means for Negro progress —vocational training and hard work in the humble trades—as the means for keeping the Negro in his place, and that place was obviously not the White House. The President’s invitation smacked of social equality, which not even Booker Washington himself advocated. He was, after all, the man who had reassured whites at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895 by announcing that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Roosevelt’s break with convention created a sensation that dominated the press for months afterward. Louis Gregory recalled that

The Roosevelt-Washington dinner, which evoked general comment, had many curious reactions, some of them humorous. A great statesman-editor who filled the public eye, joined in the general chorus of denunciation in a public word. Yet privately he wrote Booker Washington at the time: “Pay no attention to what the newspapers are saying. I am with you!” While Mr. Washington was on a Southern train a Confederate Colonel who was aboard, hearing of his presence sought him out to meet and greet him. The story is that he eulogized the Negro educator as the greatest man in America. Mr. Washington being very modest, demurred to such high praise.

“Who is any greater than you, sir?” demanded his ardent admirer.

“Why of course there is President T. Roosevelt.”

“I don’t think anything of him sir, since he ate with you, sir!”

By 1906, however, Roosevelt had probably [Page 32] won back the colonel’s approval, while losing the confidence of blacks. In response to a riot in Brownsville, Texas, involving three companies of the black Twenty-fifth Regiment, the president dismissed the entire battalion without honor and prohibited its members from future government service, civil or military. One senator called the action an “‘executive lynching’” and another worked for years to have Congress establish a court of inquiry to review the case of each discharged soldier. But relatively few people were outraged by the blatant and pervasive injustice blacks faced throughout the country, which Brownsville typified, and still fewer worked to see justice done. Overreaction against blacks was matched by indifference to white violence. White lynch mobs and rioters—in Atlanta in 1906 as in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908—were never punished for their lawless acts.

In fact the capacity of white society to raise Booker T. Washington to a position of high esteem while closing its eyes to disfranchisement and mob violence helped to create the first major ideological split in the black community in this century. On one side stood Washington, firmly supported by both whites and blacks, distinguished by his own remarkable achievements—the development of Tuskegee Institute, the popularization of a distinctive philosophy of vocational education, the channeling of money from Northern philanthropists into Negro education in the South, and the carving out of a position of national eminence marked by eloquence and tact. On the other side stood a relatively small number of people who recognized the weaknesses in Washington and his programs, along with the obvious strengths.

Their leader, W. E. B. DuBois, born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk and Harvard, wrote in 1903: “Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington.” He affirmed that Washington was “certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following.” DuBois claimed, however, that criticism among blacks had been stilled by Washington’s success as “the leader not of one race but of two,—a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro.” Even those who disliked compromise had bowed to his extraordinary influence.

DuBois called for criticism to be brought to the surface. He loosed his own forceful attack on Washington’s expediency and on his exaltation of “triumphant commercialism,” his preoccupation with “a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” He argued that Washington’s failure to lend importance to suffrage, civil rights, and liberal higher education for blacks undermined his own goals. Washington advocated that blacks advance by becoming property owners and businessmen; yet “it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods,” DuBois observed, “for workingmen and property-owners to defend that rights and exist without the right of suffrage.” Washington stressed self-respect; but DuBois claimed that “silent submission to civic inferiority . . . is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.” Washington emphasized vocational training at the expense of impractical classical education; yet “neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.” Thus Washington’s program bore the seeds of failure, according to DuBois, and played into the hands of those who expected submission and inferiority to characterize the race indefinitely. Moreover, Washington’s doctrine of self-help suggested that success or failure lay solely with blacks themselves, “when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, [Page 33]

Louis George Gregory, 1874-1951

[Page 34] and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.”

Disillusioned by Washington’s ascendancy and by continuing violence and injustice directed against blacks, DuBois and a likeminded group of young men met at Niagara Falls, Canada, in June 1905 to form a plan of action. The Niagara Movement has been called “the first organized attempt to raise the Negro protest against the great reaction after the Reconstruction.” Its demands, considered radical at the time, included manhood suffrage, equal civil rights, equal economic opportunity, free compulsory elementary education and access to high schools and colleges, legal and penal reform to end racial discrimination, fair treatment by both management and labor unions, and abolition of Jim Crow accommodations. Even more radical than the Movement’s demands was the anger that charged its rhetoric. DuBois and his fellow members refused to go knocking on white society’s back door, hat in hand. The Movement’s “Declaration of Principles” was outspoken, forceful, and relentless in its catalog of grievances. A representative paragraph states:

We repudiate the monstrous doctrine that the oppressor should be the sole authority as to the rights of the oppressed. The Negro race in America stolen, ravished and degraded, struggling up through difficulties and oppression, needs sympathy and receives criticism; needs help and is given hindrance, needs protection and is given mob-violence, needs justice and is given charity, needs leadership and is given cowardice and apology, needs bread and is given a stone. This nation will never stand justified before God until these things are changed.

Nor was there any taint of submissiveness in the 1906 manifesto composed after the Movement’s second meeting at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, which read in part:

Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow-citizens born and bred on its soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness the new American creed says: Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white. And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ. The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice.

In this same year—1906—Louis Gregory started to work at the Treasury Department and began his discussions with the Yankee and the Southerner who shared his office. Whereas the older men were inclined to rehearse the Civil War, Mr. Gregory tended to outline strategies of black activism that were unquestionably influenced by DuBois and the Niagara Movement. As unlikely as the friendship of these three co-workers may seem to have been, the strength of the bond must have been exceptional for Mr. Gregory to have trusted his friends in this way. His trust was repaid with genuine kindness (the New Englander “used playfully to call himself my grandfather”) and openmindedness on their part.

Mellowed by age, these men were very indulgent to me because of my youth and inexperience. They listened with patience to ideas of mine which were wild-eyed and radical, read articles of mine and others, offered them, without being bored, but seemed to agree upon one thing: That my program of fiery agitation in behalf of a people, whose wrongs only, I could see, would avail nothing in the removal of such wrongs, but would rather move friends and foes to combine against me. Despite my unyielding attitude, their friendship, even affection, for me grew. [Page 35] They lent me books to read, spoke soothingly when my feelings, as not infrequently happened, were ruffled, and through many acts, which showed deep interest and kindness, made an indelible impression upon my life.

Their cautionary words about “fiery agitation” were echoed by many in the black community. Kelly Miller of Howard University, whom DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk had numbered among “the thinking classes of American Negroes,” responded to the resolutions of the Niagara Movement by describing them as “‘scarcely distinguishable from a wild and frantic shriek.’” Even after the Niagara Movement was assimilated, in 1909-10, by a broader, biracial organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, conflicts within the black leadership persisted. On the Left Monroe Trotter, publisher of the Boston Guardian and outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington, refused to join the N.A.A.C.P. because he suspected the motives of the whites involved. To the Right were others equally suspicious of DuBois. In Franklin’s words:

The presence of Dr. DuBois on the staff branded the organization as radical from the beginning. Many feared that it would be a capricious, irresponsible organization that would draw its main inspiration from the dreamings of the Niagara Movement. It was denounced by most of the white philanthropists, and even some Negroes thought it unwise.

But Louis Gregory for one had been deeply influenced by DuBois and the Niagara Movement. Nearly thirty years later, in a review of DuBois’ Black Reconstruction, he acknowledged the author as the “third of the great national leaders of the American Negro,” following Douglass and Washington, and referred to The Souls of Black Folk as “his masterpiece.” The review is charged with deep admiration for DuBois, despite his recent break with the N.A.A.C.P. and increasing intellectual isolation, and with equally deep regret that this most brilliant and well-educated black leader had turned away from “the simple faith” and “spirituality” evident in The Souls of Black Folk and had disregarded the belief in God that is “the major part of his [the black man’s] history” and “the major note of his song.” DuBois undoubtedly reminded Mr. Gregory of his own state of mind in the early 1900s, when he had lost interest in religion because, in his words, he “had been seeking, but not finding truth, had given up.”

IT IS DOUBTFUL whether anyone, black or white, could have changed the focus of Louis Gregory’s “radical” ideas, made an impression on his “unyielding attitude,” or renewed his belief in religion, if his “unreconstructed” Southern friend, Thomas H. Gibbs, had not become, as Mr. Gregory described him, “the means of guiding me to the spiritual forces which for many years have directed my life.” Gibbs was neither a Bahá’í, nor was he seriously interested in the Bahá’í Faith himself; in fact “he had attended but a few of the meetings and had a very limited understanding of it.” What little he knew, however, he liked and wished to share.

Mr. Gregory for his part had no interest in investigating a new religion. Only because his friend “was most urgent and insistent that I attend a meeting, which I had no inclination to do,” and because he “thought to do [Gibbs] a favor,” did Mr. Gregory finally agree to go to the address the man had given him, “a room in the old Corcoran building, opposite the Treasury Department and long since demolished,” to attend a Bahá’í meeting.

[Page 36] The only occupant of the room when I entered was Mrs. Pauline Hannen. She gave me an unusually cordial welcome, identified me as a friend of Mr. Gibbs and told me that I would hear something very wonderful, though difficult. It would afford me an opportunity similar to that which would have been mine had I lived on earth as a contemporary of Jesus Christ. She urged me to get a full understanding of the message of today, that through it a work would be possible that would bless humanity. She kindly gave me three pieces of Bahá’í literature. . . . Soon thereafter entered another lady, Mrs. Lua M. Getsinger, referred to as “our teacher”. A little later came two colored ladies, Miss Millie York and Miss Nellie Gray. So uncomfortable was the night that no one else came.

Mrs. Getsinger gave the message historically, recounting the appearances of the Bab and Baha’u’llah and of the great persecutions and martyrdoms in Persia. Her recital was brief but vivid. Mrs. Hannen invited me to another meeting. It was held at the home of the two colored friends previously mentioned, among poor people. Mrs. Hannen was the teacher and her loving service was impressive. She then invited me to come to her home where I would meet either herself or her husband for further teaching. Mr. Joseph H. Hannen thus became my teacher, a service in which he was aided by his wife. Over a period of more than eighteen months I went to their home on Sunday evenings, sacrificing time previously given to social life.

Pauline Hannen had warned that the message of Bahá’u’lláh would be challenging, “difficult.” Gregory had come upon it inadvertently and attended his first meeting reluctantly. Yet stirred by her assurance that it would make possible “a work . . . that would bless humanity,” he began to investigate the Bahá’í Faith. Gradually it proved itself to be the truth he had given up finding. He saw it, moreover, as a remedy for the plight of black Americans, an answer to the “noble . . . prayer” DuBois had raised on behalf of his people after the Atlanta riot of 1906. Widely circulated for many years, the prayer read, as Gregory once quoted it:

“Bewildered are we and passion tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of our crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the plan; give us the sign; whisper—speak—call, great God, for Thy silence is white terror to our hearts! The way, O God, show us the way and point us the Path!”

DuBois’ words had indeed been heard, Mr. Gregory was convinced. “Heaven and earth heard that piercing cry, uttered by one, echoed by millions,” he wrote in his review of Black Reconstruction. “Earth and heaven answered.” For Louis Gregory the “plan,” the “sign,” the “way,” and the “Path” that DuBois had implored God to reveal was the Bahá’í Faith.

Yet to accept a new “plan” meant to place oneself outside the pale of the “talented tenth,” to commit oneself to a seemingly obscure point of view that as yet no other black intellectual shared. If the loneliness of his position troubled him, it was in any case short-lived. Soon, through his own efforts and those of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the unfamiliar name Bahá’í became widely known among American blacks. During ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to America in 1912, He addressed a number of black and interracial audiences, from Howard University to a national convention of the N.A.A.C.P. DuBois himself met ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, taught at Green Acre, a Bahá’í study [Page 37] camp in Maine, and retained connections with Bahá’ís at least until the mid-1930s. It seems, however, that he never fully recognized the social implications and worldwide scope of the Bahá’í movement. Other black leaders did, nonetheless, probably the most influential being Professor Alain Locke of Howard University and Robert L. Abbott, founding editor of the Chicago Defender.

Although Louis Gregory had diverged from DuBois’ path in 1909, it may be argued that, as a Bahá’í, Mr. Gregory became even more unorthodox and radical in a fundamental sense than he had been in his “wild-eyed” days. He did not put aside his concern for racial equality and social justice in favor of a preoccupation with personal salvation or the usual concerns of traditional religion. Nor did he lose touch with individuals and groups working in their own ways for change. Rather, he placed his undiminished concern for the welfare of his people within the universal context of the establishment of a new world order: “This Most Great Reconstruction which the majestic Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh brings to view, is not black or white or yellow or brown or red, yet all of these. It is the power of divine outpouring and endless perfections for mankind.”

Thus during the critical years when black activism was enlarging its scope in America (the Niagara Movement merging into the N.A.A.C.P. and several New York organizations joining forces as the National Urban League), Louis Gregory was also seeking resolution of the problems of his people in a broadly based movement. Unlike the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League, however, the Bahá’í Cause was not national but international, not biracial but multiracial, not issue oriented but issue encompassing, not directed toward social change in itself but toward spiritual transformation of both the individual and society. It promised to alter completely the patterns of racial discrimination reinforced by class, caste, and religion in America and throughout the world and ultimately to create a new world civilization in which the characteristics and contributions of all peoples would play a part. Indeed, in adopting the Bahá’í point of view Mr. Gregory paralleled, and actually anticipated, DuBois’ own inexorable progress toward acceptance of a universal philosophy, a world-encircling path—pan-Africanism and international socialism, in DuBois’ case—that would reconcile racial pride with the ideal of human brotherhood.

Having espoused the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh as the means toward the “Most Great Reconstruction,” Louis Gregory found that his position was necessarily that of pathfinder and pioneer. The way toward reconstruction had to be made visible and accessible to others. The negative response of his friends created the first major obstacle along the path.

By far the majority of my friends thought I had become mentally unbalanced. One of

my old teachers, a professor of international law and a very affectionate friend, almost wept over my departure from orthodoxy and with others warned me that I was blasting all hopes of a career. The Washington Bee, a well-known colored newspaper, on one occasion gave me two columns of ridicule which remained unanswered. Others, knowing my controversial habits [i.e., habit of engaging in controversy] of the past said, “He must have religion since he does not answer that!”

Nonetheless he saw even the opposition to his having become a Bahá’í as a partly constructive thing, since “there were always some who were willing to investigate and the opposition seemed to promote inquiry.”

The second major obstacle became apparent when his friends began to question the practice of segregation within the Washington Bahá’í community. Bahá’ís in those early years had not achieved unity of conscience with regard to racial equality. Indeed, they were struggling toward a sense of their own identity. They had become Bahá’ís for [Page 38] many reasons, often with very little knowledge or understanding of the full scope of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings or of the implications of His Revelation. They came from every sort of religious, economic, ethnic, and educational background. They were enthusiastic believers; many corresponded with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and were deeply attached to Him. Yet most were still bound by strong ties to churches and clubs, philosophies and intellectual fads that influenced their everyday lives, and all were virtually without access to the untranslated wealth of Bahá’í literature. Having no clergy, which Bahá’u’lláh had expressly excluded from the Bahá’í order, and as yet without either a wide selection of sacred literature, the study of which forms the basis of individual spiritual responsibility, or a functioning administration, the early Bahá’ís in America lacked the means of immediately assuring fundamental unity. They clung to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, to His letters and His very presence in the world; at the same time they remained individualistic, even idiosyncratic, in their communal relationships.

A story told by one of the early pilgrims who visited ‘Abdu’l-Bahá illustrates His role in the American community during those years. Anna Watson wrote from ‘Akká in 1904 that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had recounted at tea one morning a dream He had about America. In the dream He had been told by a number of His followers that “there were many earnest believers in America, but that they were far apart and all playing on different musical instruments, so that they did not play in harmony.” On hearing this, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá said He would see what He could do. “‘Finding one, I told him to stay until I brought others to him, but when I came back with another, the first had gone away piping on his instrument,’” the Master recounted. “‘And so it was; I could never get them together.’” When He awoke from this dream, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá added, “‘I was very tired.’”

Correspondingly, as Louis Gregory soon found, the fundamental Bahá’í principle of the oneness of mankind elicited varied responses from the Bahá’ís themselves. In fact, as the Hannens told him shortly after he became a Bahá’í in 1909, the practice of separate meetings had never even been discussed by the community members, although ‘Abdu’l-Bahá apparently had directed them to hold interracial meetings as early as February of that year. Whites like Lua Getsinger, the Hannens, and Mrs. Hannen’s sisters, Alma and Fanny Knobloch, all of whom were well aware of the implications of racial unity in the Bahá’í teachings, were already participating in integrated meetings, both in public places and in private homes. Other white Bahá’ís were not, either because racial mixing was uncustomary or because it was distasteful to them personally. Many who had been attracted to the Faith by one principle or another, or by the Person of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, would have been horror-struck to discover that to be a Bahá’í meant to be a proponent of racial equality. There did not yet exist any administrative means or even any general sense of necessity to bring such unreconstructed whites into conformity with the Bahá’í principle of oneness.

But Louis Gregory proved to be an agent of change in the Washington community. He was the firSt black Bahá’í from the “talented tenth.” A cultivated and articulate lawyer, he was not deterred by lack of education or social standing from assuming an active role or from challenging the community’s racial practices. Under his questioning, the old, unconsidered habits of segregation had to be confronted by the community; and, once the issue had been raised, it could not be dismissed. Louis Gregory began, quietly but uncompromisingly, to lay the groundwork for the changes he knew were inevitable.

Perhaps the most effective challenge to the habit of segregation was brought about by an increase in the number of Bahá’ís or serious students of the Faith from the gifted [Page 39] and influential circle of blacks in which Louis Gregory moved. In July 1909 he had written to the Hannens that he wanted to arrange a presentation of the Bahá’í teachings to a large meeting of the Bethel Literary and Historical Association. The hoped-for meeting turned into a series of meetings, the fourth of which Joseph Hannen assessed in a report to Bahai News the following spring.

The Bethel Literary and Historical Society, the oldest and leading colored organization in the city, devoted its session of Tuesday, April 5, to the Bahai Revelation, Mr. Hannen and Dr. Fareed speaking on the subject of “The Race Question from the Standpoint of the Bahai Revelation.” This Society, of which Mr. Louis G. Gregory is President, have given three previous sessions this season to the Bahai Teachings, and this has exerted a powerful influence in the work among the intelligent circles of this people, whom we are commanded to reach and help as brothers and sisters.

In another report Mr. Hannen mentioned two recent meetings arranged by the wife of a Howard University professor, at which Roy Wilhelm and Percy F. Woodcock, Bahá’í visitors from the New York area, spoke to interested groups of black intellectuals. Such a ferment of activity, focusing on individuals whose education and professional status made them thoroughly respectable on every count except color, could not be ignored by the white Bahá’ís. Obviously some action had to be taken to accommodate these people.

By March 1910 the Washington community had held its first formal interracial meeting and proudly reported in the first issue of the national journal Bahai News:

On the evening of March 6th, an important gathering assembled at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hannen, representing the joining in one meeting of the white and colored Bahais and friends of this city. Considerable work is being done among the latter, and a regular weekly meeting is held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dyer, 1937 13th street, N.W., on Wednesdays. In February of last year, Abdul-Baha commanded that to prove the validity of our Teachings and as a means of removing existing prejudices between the races, a Spiritual Assembly or meeting be held, preferably at the home of one of the white Bahais, in which both races should join. This is the first meeting of that character, and is to be repeated monthly. There were present about 35 persons, one-third of whom were colored, and nearly all believers. It is also planned that every fourth Unity Feast [forerunner of the Nineteen-Day Feast], beginning April 9, should be held in such manner that both races can join. This is a radical step in this section of the country, and is in reality making history.

And on 9 April the Unity Feast was carried out as planned. Joseph Hannen described it in Bahai News as “wonderfully blessed and successful” and noted that “several leading men and women of the colored race attended.” The hostess for the evening was Fanny Knobloch and the speaker Louis Gregory.

The mixed meetings continued throughout that year. A large number of people, black and white, attended a meeting at the Dyers’ on 15 June at which Hippolyte Dreyfus of Paris spoke, and audiences of one hundred or more filled the hall of the Conservatory of Music for the integrated Unity Feasts of 5 June, 1 August, 16 October, and 12 December, at one of which Mr. Gregory spoke and at another served as host. Yet these integrated meetings were still the exception, and a certain number of whites continued to regard [Page 40] them as an aberration and a liability in their efforts to attract to the Cause the “better sort” of people in Washington, among whom the black intelligentsia obviously was not included. Thirty years later Louis Gregory described with remarkable objectivity the conditions that were to continue in the city for many years and at times were to separate completely the different factions.

One matter that caused much difficulty in adjustment was the wise handling of the American race problem, especially in the Southern atmosphere of such a city as Washington. Some of the friends, reading the command of Bahá’u’lláh which read: “Close your eyes to racial differences and welcome all with the light of oneness,” interpreted it to mean that all barriers of race should be put aside in every meeting that was planned for teaching the Faith. Others knew the principle as wise and just, but felt that the time was not yet ripe for its application. One difficulty was finding places, either private or public, that were willing to welcome all races. In the same family, one or more members being Bahá’í and the others not believers, the mixing of races would cause a family disturbance. Even where all the believers were free from prejudices some felt that it would upset inquirers after the truth if they were confronted too soon with signs of racial equality. One of the friends went so far as to state that some of the Bahá’í principles would not be operative for a full thousand years! On the other hand, others were [insistent] that such principles should be upheld and applied even though the world should go to smash. As for a thousand years in future, there might be another Manifestation [in Bahá’í terms, one of the divinely inspired Teachers Who have founded the great religions, such as Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity] with laws for another day. But the laws of this Manifestation were for this day and must be applied.

Whatever doubts Louis Gregory may have had at first in regard to his role in integrating the Washington Bahá’í Community were firmly put aside by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. His first letter to Mr. Gregory in November 1909 expressed the hope that he might become “the means whereby the white and colored people shall close their eyes to racial differences” and “the cause of the guidance of both races.” Accordingly, Mr. Gregory began to work in three distinct though interrelated areas of endeavor upon which he focused his activities for more than four decades.

FIRST, he became a spokesman of the Bahá’í Cause to his own people. In those days of strict segregation in the South and deepening racial animosity in the North, the doors that were closed in the faces of blacks were often closed from the other side to white Bahá’ís seeking to share Bahá’u’lláh’s message. As a Southerner residing in Washington, Louis Gregory was uniquely placed both to spread knowledge of the Faith among blacks in the capital and in the large metropolitan areas of the North, which attracted increasing numbers of blacks during and after the First World War, and to return to the South to teach. Wherever he went, he was likely to find in the black community friends and acquaintances from Fisk and Howard. In fact, even before becoming a Bahá’í, he had given literature to friends during a 1908 visit to Kansas City, Missouri. One of the recipients, Edith Chapman, eventually became the first Bahá’í there.

In 1910 Louis Gregory made his first teaching trip, stopping in eight Southern cities, including Richmond, Virginia; Durham, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Macon, Georgia. “Am just having the time of my life!” he wrote to the Hannens from Charleston. “Have many engagements to speak, in churches and at gatherings, [Page 41] on Bahaism.” A subsequent report in Bahai News noted that he had spoken directly to about nine hundred people during the trip and that blacks in the South showed promise of being “deeply and vitally interested.” Many years later he looked back on that first experiment as a traveling Bahá’í teacher with the experience of a seasoned speaker, recalling that “in every city people were found who accepted the great Message, however crudely and abruptly given, and the spirit was powerful.” He explained that communities were not established at the time, however, because “the system of follow-up work was not then developed.”

Later, particularly after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá launched a program for the worldwide expansion of the Faith by the American Bahá’ís, Louis Gregory returned often to the South, traveling for months at a time, meeting friends from previous trips and making countless new ones. A familiar visitor at black colleges and secondary schools in the South, he frequently lectured at Tuskegee Institute (twice at the invitation of Booker T. Washington) and at Fisk. He also maintained close contact with black intellectuals and professionals both North and South and assured that they were well aware of the Bahá’í teachings.

His second area of endeavor was Bahá’í administration. Well suited by his education and legal training to become a leader in the Bahá’í community, he was first elected to office in February 1911, less than two years after he became a Bahá’í, when a special election was called to fill a vacancy on Washington’s Working Committee. The election indicated the community’s appreciation of his valuable qualities of leadership and of the services he had already rendered in his brief period of membership. It also revealed, as he suggested in the following letter to Joseph Hannen, the determination of the Washington Bahá’ís to do something about the problems of race within their own ranks:

I have your kind favor of the 4th, advising me of the action of the Working Committee of the Bahai Assembly in electing me to membership. My emotion upon reading it was a commingling of pleasure and [embarrassment]. There is joy, because I know that this action springs from a noble impulse on the part of the committee. It evinces breadth and the Guidance of the Spirit. Who knows how far-reaching the effect will be in advancing the Cause of God in the future?

The [embarrassment] is due to the fact that what is truly a great honor should be given one so unworthy. I agree to serve temporarily, until some one with a wise head and noble heart may be found, who may thus more fitly represent my race.

From this “temporary” service as the first black on Washington’s administrative body, Mr. Gregory went on to become the first black elected to the Executive Board of Bahai Temple Unity, as the national administrative body was first known, on 30 April 1912, when a tie for the ninth and last place on the Board was broken in his favor by unanimous vote of the delegates to the fourth annual convention. Later that same day this remarkable convention was given lasting historical significance by the arrival of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Who addressed the final public meeting of the convention.

Louis Gregory again accepted election to the Executive Board in 1918. On other occasions he declined his election, following a customary practice during the Temple Unity years. In 1921 he and another black, [Page 42] Mabry C. Oglesby of Boston, were appointed to the new National Teaching Committee. In 1922, as the development of Bahá’í administration under the guardianship of Shoghi Effendi was just beginning, he became a member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada, serving a total of fourteen years on that body until ill health curtailed his activities in 1946. Although other blacks emerged on the national level during those years, it was not until early in 1946 that a second black, lawyer Elsie Austin, was elected to the National Spiritual Assembly to replace ailing member Roy Wilhelm; her period of membership thus coincided with Louis Gregory’s for a few months.

Over the years Mr. Gregory filled a number of unobtrusive but important administrative roles—recording secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly, for example, and member of committees to audit the Temple treasury and to handle legal matters such as drawing up the by-laws of the newly formed National Assembly. He was most in the public eye at the time of the annual national convention, which he often served as speaker, convention secretary, and particularly reporter.

Third, Louis Gregory became a standard-bearer for the cause of racial unity. As a writer, lecturer, and for many years an administrator of a national Bahá’í interracial committee, he advanced that cause both directly and indirectly. Whatever his topic, by the simple act of addressing a largely white gathering, he reaffirmed the principle of racial equality and indirectly raised the consciousness of the audience. His first speaking engagements of national significance occurred in Chicago in 1912, during the Fourth Annual Convention of Bahai Temple Unity, which he attended as a delegate from Washington. On Saturday, 27 April, he spoke briefly at a special commemoration called the “Feast of Rizwan,” organized by the Chicago community and open to the delegates and visitors to the convention. At “a large public meeting” the following morning he gave a featured address on “The Reality of Humanity.”

Thereafter, he spoke regularly during the annual conventions. In 1913 in New York at the final public session of the convention he “addressed the assemblage in his usual earnest, powerful and effective manner.” In 1914 in Chicago he again was a featured speaker, along with Mariam Haney of Washington, D.C., and Edward B. Kinney of New York, at a large public meeting. Alfred Lunt reported to the Star of the West that

Mr. Louis G. Gregory then spoke of the object of the Bahai Movement as divine unity of man with God, and the manifestation of this unity in brotherhood, confirming all that is good and true in every religion. That the differences [sic] between men, in the final analysis, is a difference of vision, while the difference between the savage and civilized man, in regard to what we call civilization, is entirely a difference of degree. He referred to the great contribution of the state of Illinois to the life of the race, in Abraham Lincoln; how Illinois was to the front of spiritual and practical ideals in granting the franchise to women, one of the Bahai foundations; then read from the Hidden Words, “O Children of Men! Do ye know why we have created ye [sic] from one clay? That none should glorify himself over the others,” etc.

At the 1916 convention he gave talks on [Page 43] the “Demonstration of Divinity and Inspiration —The Word” and “The Interdependence of Individuals, Nations and Races.” Subsequently, he wrote an account of some of the sessions for Star of the West, thus emerging as a regular contributor to Bahá’í publications. In 1917 he spoke at the convention and again that November at the centennial celebration of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh, when his topic was “The New Educational System of Bahá’u’lláh.” At the 1918 and 1919 conventions his subjects were “The Underlying Unity of all Religions” and “The Power of the Holy Spirit.” He ranged comfortably over a wide variety of Bahá’í subjects.

Only in 1920 did he begin to deal repeatedly and directly in his lectures and articles with the theme of racial amity. His misgivings about a direct approach, which some people might see as special pleading for his race, were set aside as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá showed mounting concern over racial conflict in America. Mr. Gregory’s topic at the convention that year and again in 1921 was “The Oneness of Mankind,” and the first volume of the Bahai Year Book, later titled The Bahá’í World, carried an article called “Racial Unity,” based on another public talk given in 1921. When a Racial Amity Committee was formed by the National Spiritual Assembly in 1927, Louis Gregory became its executive secretary; thereafter, he was for years either its secretary or chairman, and he served on its behalf as speaker on many platforms.

Finally, during all this time he demonstrated in his personal relationships—which he carried on with dignity, common sense, and good-humored disregard for criticism and hostility—his belief that mankind is one family. His circle of white friends and acquaintances among the Bahá’ís widened as he traveled and attended conventions from San Francisco to Boston. Both present-day reminiscences and letters written during his lifetime reveal extraordinary respect and admiration for him. A representative passage appears in a letter from Howard Colby Ives, a former Unitarian minister, who became a distinguished Bahá’í writer and itinerant teacher. “I cannot refrain, dear Louis, from speaking of the great love we both bear towards you,” he wrote on behalf of himself and his equally remarkable wife, Mabel Rice-Wray Ives. “Of all the souls in the Cause we know of none whose humble servitude, tranquil power, and selfless teaching is so constant and so unassuming.” The sincere high regard in which these and other white Bahá’ís held Louis Gregory was itself a force to destroy barriers of prejudice and unthinking discrimination.

[Page 44]

The Year of the Child

(for my Grandson)

And you have come,

Michael Ahmán, to share

your life with us.

We have given you

an archangel’s name—

and a great poet’s;

we honor too

Abysinnian Ahmán,

hero of peace.

May these names

be talismans;

may they invoke divine

magic to protect

you, as we cannot,

in a world that is

no place for a child—

that had no shelter

for the children in Guyana

slain by hands

they trusted; no succor

for the Biafran

child with swollen belly

and empty begging-bowl;

no refuge for the child

of the Warsaw ghetto.

[Page 45]

What we yearned

but were powerless to do

for them, oh we

will dare, Michael, for you,

knowing our need

of unearned increments

of grace.

I look into your

brilliant eyes, whose gaze

renews, transforms

each common thing, and hope

that inner vision

will intensify

their seeing. I am

content meanwhile to have

you glance at me

sometimes, as though, if you

could talk, you’d let

us in on a subtle joke.

May Huck and Jim

attend you. May you walk

with beauty before you,

beauty behind you, all

around you and

The Most Great Beauty keep

you His concern.

—Robert Hayden

[Page 46]

[Page 47]

Ecumenism and the Agapastic Attitude

BY MARY CARMAN ROSE

THE AGAPASTIC ATTITUDE is the desire to comprehend and learn from religious positions other than one’s own. It is also the desire to coexist and cooperate with those whose religious convictions are different from one’s own. What follows is an examination of the agapastic attitude, its importance for ecumenism, and its roles in ecumenism.

The agapastic attitude has four aspects. First, to cultivate the agapastic attitude is to cultivate respect for all people with whom one enters into ecumenical dialogue. For example, the Zen Buddhist must cultivate respect for the Trinitarian Christian, and the Quaker, respect for the Roman Catholic. Second, to cultivate the agapastic attitude is to cultivate a willingness to foster the other person’s freedom to seek his own metaphysico-religious path and to adopt that path to the extent that the adoption is compatible with the fostering of the agapastic attitude. It is important to distinguish between the first and second aspects of the agapastic attitude. For all metaphysico-religious positions with which the agapastic attitude is compatible also possess at least the seeds of the ideal of the cultivation of respect for all people.

However, they are not committed to the fostering of metaphysico-religious positions that are inherently destructive of the agapastic attitude.

Third, to cultivate the agapastic attitude is to approach religions other than one’s own with the willingness, if not the eagerness, to learn of their views concerning man, reality, and values. Fourth, to cultivate the agapastic attitude is to cultivate the willingness, if not the hope, that some of what one learns concerning other religions will enrich one’s own religious position and commitment.

In this essay my emphasis on the roles of the agapastic attitude in ecumenism derives from a hypothesis concerning an interrelatedness among the various religious positions. My hypothesis is that there is an objective reality and that insofar as a religious position possesses truth it provides some insight into the one reality. On this hypothesis no one religion possesses all such insight. Further, on this hypothesis any one religion is a way of life developed out of a particular perspective on reality; it provides one or more ways in which the individual can gain that perspective; and it promises a particular [Page 48] quality of satisfaction-in-living that is the correlative of the adoption of that perspective. The individual who seeks a religion that will be satisfactory to him seeks a perspective on reality and man that will provide him with spiritual satisfaction. The individual who changes from one religion to another has found a new perspective on reality and man that provides him with greater satisfaction than the old.

The most fundamental differences among religions result from the fact that each religion derives from a distinctive perspective on reality and man. Moreover, within any one religion some variations of belief as well as of practice are to be expected because each perspective yields insights that may be variously emphasized and combined. It is also to be expected that there will be families of religions—that is, religions having features in common. For example, Christianity, Judaism, Islám, and Ramanuja’s version of Hinduism are alike in teaching the reality and “religious availability” of the transcendent God. Samkyha and Vedanta Hinduism, Hasidic Judaism, and pagan Platonism are alike in providing quasiscientific disciplines by means of which the individual through his own efforts (that is, apparently without what the Christian calls grace) may achieve spiritual development. Error in the interpretation of its own perspective on the one reality and man is also possible for any religion; and any religion errs that holds that only its teachings concerning reality and man are true.

The foregoing is suggested by resemblances among the great world religions as well as among some that have not been widely accepted and among some perspectives on reality and man that are not usually identified as religions but that nonetheless demand total commitment and serve as ways of life for many persons. Examples of the last are the Platonism of the Laws, the Republic, and Socrates’ speech in the Symposium; the neo-Platonism of Plotinus; the Jewish Platonism of the Zohar; and the occultism of the “right hand path.” Common to them all are the beliefs that there is an objective order that is given to man and, hence, that man is not in the Protagorean sense the measure of all things; that reality fosters specific values; and that the values grounded in reality foster respect for human life, or perhaps all life.

A recent emphasis on resemblances among religions has to some extent led to an unwarranted assimilation of one religion to another. Hence there is need to draw attention to the irreducible differences among religions. Indeed, the hypothesis that there is one reality concerning which each religion possesses some, but only some, truth gains additional support from these differences. For the latter suggest that each religion views reality from a distinctive perspective, while the fact that an individual’s adoption of any one religion tends to increase his courage, integrity, and goodwill toward other people [Page 49] suggests that he has entered into a distinctive relation with reality and its objective values.

Yet among the world religions there has not been widespread explicit acceptance of the agapastic attitude. The reasons for this are not far to seek. In the past, differences rather than resemblances among religions have been emphasized. That a mutual exclusiveness properly exists among religions has been taken for granted. And where a generosity toward all religions has been a part of the teaching of any one religion, this teaching has generally taken the form of the assertion that one religion expresses literally what others express symbolically or in some other indirect mode.

Thus the agapastic attitude will not be a significant factor in present-day religious positions unless it is deliberately introduced. Perhaps, however, most religions already contain at least the seeds of this attitude, although in developing these seeds any one religion will most likely undergo some change. To what extent it will change will depend upon the extent to which it has claimed to be the exclusive path of salvation and satisfaction-in-living, the extent to which it is prepared to foster respect for all persons, and the extent to which it is prepared to recognize the complexity of reality and to foster a wonder concerning aspects of reality and human experiences not included among its teachings. Certainly all of the great world religions possess at least the seeds of the agapastic attitude, and within some of them are individuals who have already taken steps to develop these seeds. The steps are taken with difficulty, however; and tendencies toward the old exclusiveness remain, as do the tendencies toward explaining away religious views that differ from one’s own as trivial or false.

Some ways of life, however, are not compatible with the agapastic attitude. For some this is true because the perspectives on man and reality from which they are derived do not foster an interest in what one does not already know. In recent years positivism, metaphysical naturalism, and philosophical anthropology have been the basis for ways of life for some people and, as a rule, have been incompatible with the interest in aspects of reality not already known to the thinker himself.

For example, positivists feel that all reliable beliefs are the product of scientific inquiry and that science is known to be a human imposition of order on experience. Metaphysical naturalists believe that twentieth-century science has taken the measure of reality. Finally, philosophical anthropologists believe that metaphysical truth in the classical-realist sense that is accepted by all the great world religions cannot be achieved, for all such truth is a culturally determined and humanly created understanding of the human predicament. Clearly these convictions concerning truth are not compatible with the sense of wonder before what one does not know but that one can learn from others who have walked a religious path different from one’s own.

[Page 50] Another impediment to the introduction of the agapastic attitude into a particular religion is the presence in the religion of the belief that, though there is much concerning man and reality that is not yet known, all that is relevant to the finding of a satisfactory way of life is provided by the religion in question. Thus metaphysical naturalism stresses the diversity to be found within reality and the human spirit, but yet is informed by the belief that scientific knowledge of nature alone provides a basis for a satisfactory way of life. Specifically, Marxism is compatible with an interest in the diversity of man’s interests and of reality, but it takes a particular type of economic system to be the one means of achieving spiritual fulfillment for all persons. The Whiteheadian perspective on reality, culture, and human life stresses the diversity of the various aspects of the world and of human relations to the world but nonetheless offers to all men as summum bonum resignation concerning what it asserts are necessary limitations on the happiness of the individual.

A perspective on reality that does not foster in those who adopt it respect for human life and its spiritual dimensions and potentialities is also not compatible with the agapastic attitude. C. S. Lewis draws attention to the dire effects on individuals and on interpersonal relations of the way of life that is grounded in desire for scientific exploitation of man as well as nature, that accepts a positivistic interpretation of scientific inquiry and technology, and that rejects the view that some values are grounded in reality. Nietzsche’s superman-slave dichotomy encourages the giving to only a few human beings the respect for their way of life enjoined by the agapastic attitude.

The adoption of the agapastic attitude will have beneficial effects on studies of religion, ecumenical dialogues, and the religious commitment of the people who accept the attitude.

Studies of religion can be used to designate an individual’s informal study of religions other than his own; dialogues between people of different faiths; the formal study of particular religions, comparative religion, and the history of religions; and scientific (for example, psychological, sociological, and anthropological) investigations of religion. Assurance that people of different faiths can achieve some understanding of each other’s religious convictions, commitments, and aspirations derives from the hypothesis that diverse religions possess different degrees and types of insight into the one reality. For if each religion is grounded in real, though limited, insight into objective reality, similarities in beliefs, in methods of achieving and deepening belief, and in the satisfaction of commitment to a religious position are to be expected with resulting genuine, though limited, mutual understanding among those faithful to any one religion. The limitations are to be expected because the valuational, spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual nature of an individual is gradually but profoundly changed by his appropriation of a particular religious view. The only person who is acquainted with the distinctive quality of satisfaction-in-living as well as with the recurring doubts and sacrifices that accompany the acceptance of a particular view is the one who perseveres in its disciplines, cultivates its aspirations, and makes his decisions in terms of its values and beliefs.

[Page 51] Like any inquiry, the study of religion may be vitiated by the investigator’s unexamined assumptions pertaining to his area of inquiry. Thus the student of religion who accepts a Hobbesian or hedonistic view of man may reductively interpret Zen Buddhist gentleness or Christian agape in terms of his view. The Christian who believes that a particular Christian denomination provides the only path to salvation may not make the effort to understand Vedantist or Jain spirituality. Moreover, a person may find it difficult to become aware of his own assumptions pertaining to religions he studies. In at least two ways, however, the agapastic attitude is an aid in discerning and assessing one’s assumptions.

On the one hand, the person who enters into an ecumenical dialogue with someone who brings the agapastic attitude to the dialogue encounters a person who is eager to have his religious position understood and to share, as far as he can, his reasons for his commitment to it. On the other hand, the person who assumes the agapastic attitude is thereby encouraged to identify and assess his assumptions about the religions he studies. Thus a conviction that only one’s own religion provides religiously significant truth about reality and man is challenged by a willingness to eschew the belief that what one does not know already is not worth knowing. This willingness is also fostered by two additional dimensions of the agapastic attitude: respect for those who hold the religion one investigates and hope for the enrichment of one’s own religious commitment by virtue of what one learns from them.

Thus the assumption of the agapastic attitude on the part of those whose religious commitment is investigated fosters a willingness to be helpful to the investigator. The assumption of the agapastic attitude on the part of the investigator entails his willingness to seek from those who accept the religion verification of the adequacy of his conclusions. Clearly, those who embrace a particular religion constitute a major source of insight and data pertaining to it. Students of a particular religion have not, however, systematically used this opportunity for the assessment of the adequacy of their conclusions.

Important studies of religion not assessed in this way are Freud’s conclusion that the Judeo-Christian belief in a transcendent God is a projection born of human weakness and Feuerbach’s conclusion that it is a projection born of human strength. Conversations with Christians reveal, however, the inadequacy of both. To be sure, Christian faith can give consolation in time of need for a human father’s protection. But Freud’s conclusions about the role of faith in the life of the believer are derived from only this fact. He misses altogether the more fundamental fact that Christian faith has its root in what are fruitfully interpreted as spiritual talents—for example, the willingness to fight for great causes, to cultivate love of neighbor, and to lose one’s life to find it. Likewise, the acceptance by the Christian community of Feuerbach’s view of the source of Christian faith would have destroyed that community. For his view altogether misses the fact that the Christian is committed to the belief in a God Who is real.

However any one study of religion is carried out, it probably will require, and certainly will benefit from, the collection of evidence from many sources and the subsequent interpretation of the evidence. Yet no bell rings to inform the investigator that he has collected enough evidence that is relevant to his inquiry, that he has had access to all the sources of data, or that his mode of [Page 52] interpretation of his data has been accurate. He cannot be sure that he has not misunderstood the content or significance of the religious beliefs and commitments he studied and of their effects upon those who hold them. Hence, investigation of present-day religion is incomplete unless it include data and suggestions for their interpretation from as many sources as are available; those who know a religion at first hand by virtue of having made it their way of life are an important source of both.

The study of religions other than one’s own is, however, only one facet of ecumenism. As a rule, the person who is committed to one religious position is also in some sense asked to coexist with those who do not share his religious commitment. He may have opportunity to help foster their religious communities while remaining faithful to his own. However, by virtue either of his own inclination or of the demands of his religious community he may be eager to persuade others to accept his religious views.

It is clear that the religious community that fosters the agapastic attitude will endeavor to coexist in peace with other religions. It will foster the wellbeing and religious freedom of other groups to the extent that its resources and degree of commitment to the agapastic attitude permit. Nonetheless, as we have already noted, failure to understand some of the most important features of a religious group other than one’s own may be present with resulting annoyances on one or both sides. To this lack of understanding the agapastic attitude brings a determination to eschew the assumption that religious beliefs, practices, and aspirations that are not included in one way of life are not of value to any way of life. It also brings the expectation of an increase in the knowledge of the depths, diversity, and complexity of human religious convictions, experiences, and practices.

It IS, therefore, to be expected that the agapastic attitude will bring about changes in the religious positions into which it is introduced and into the religious commitment of the individuals who accept these positions. It can create an eagerness to learn the religious values, needs, practices, and expectations of those whose perspectives on reality differ from one’s own; and it can mitigate annoyances that occur in encounters with people of diverse faiths. To those who are annoyed and perhaps inconvenienced by the religious needs and practices of others the agapaStic attitude can bring respect for the rights of others and a desire to accord them the freedom from annoyance that they wish for themselves.

THE EXCLUSIVENESS with which some religions have until now been interpreted is not compatible with the agapastic attitude. Of course, the exclusiveness has been a deterrent to the discernment of the multifaceted importance of the agapasric attitude. The exclusiveness has taken a number of forms. It has derived from the belief that there is one and only one true religion that cannot coexist with others, from the belief that only one religion is true while some others may be tolerated as harmless though ineffective in the individual’s quest for spiritual fulfillment, and from the belief that there is only one religion that is literally true, while all others are mythologized [Page 53] versions of it. These beliefs are not compatible with the agapastic attitude, and the rejection of the beliefs through assumption of this attitude will have important effects on a religious position. This is made clear through the rejection of the exclusivist attitude on the part of the Bahá’í Faith and the subsequent effects this Faith has had on some of the rest of us who, while committed to our own religions, have benefited tremendously from our association with the Faith and our appreciation of its ecumenical work as witnessed in the Wilmette Temple.

For wherever the agapastic attitude is introduced into a religious position the teaching of the latter concerning the variety of possible paths to human spiritual fulfillment will be enlarged. For example, there is a great deal of evidence that an individual can benefit religiously by being a part of a religious group that is not to be his permanent spiritual home. Many a Christian is grateful for childhood training in one Christian denomination, though as an adult he is committed to another. The success of Vedantism in the West indicates that some who are brought up as Jews or Christians can find ultimate spiritual fulfillment in Hinduism. Analogous comments hold true for those brought up in Chinese, Japanese, or Indian religions but who are now Christians. In connection with the Bahá’í Faith it is important to note that the Bahá’í teachings explicitly urge the faithful to continue to draw spiritual nourishment from the religions of their childhood.

Any perspective on man and reality and the way of life to which it gives rise can for a time be satisfying to some individuals for whom it finally proves to have been a step on the way—albeit a most important step—to their finding a religion that permanently answers their spiritual needs, gifts, and aspirations. Moreover, it is a truism that even though every such perspective satisfies great numbers of persons, so far no one of them has proved to be the ultimate spiritual home of all. It is too soon to predict what relations among religions will develop if the present interest in ecumenism continues, if those who enter into ecumenical dialogues assume the agapastic attitude, and if through the rejection of religious exclusiveness this attitude has a dynamic, developmental effect on the religion into which it is introduced.

The agapastic attitude in ecumenism can become a factor in drawing attention to a feature of the epistemology of the acceptance of a religious position that, although it has been widely recognized in philosophy of religion, has not yet had sufficient attention within ecumenism. This is the fact that religious convictions must be achieved through the individual’s own efforts. Although in some—if not all—instances the individual has had help (for example, teaching, a pointing of the way, or encouragement) from other persons in the achievement of his religious convictions, it is primarily by his own efforts that he has achieved these convictions. This is true in different senses for different positions. It is not true in the same way, for example, for Trinitarian Christianity, Kabbalistic Judaism, Zen Buddhism, or metaphysical naturalism.

This feature of the epistemology of religious commitment together with the importance of the agapastic attitude in ecumenism illumines from a new [Page 54] perspective much of the missionary, proselytizing, and teaching activities that have characterized religious groups. Coercion is incompatible with both the agapastic attitude and with the epistemology of the individual’s learning about the religious position in the name of which the coercion is carried on. A conviction of the truth of the religious position and a desire to adopt it express the individual’s insights, interests, and hopes. The latter are, of course, in turn expressed in his behavior, which can be coerced. They are, however, fundamentally a matter of his inwardness from which his behavior issues and which cannot be coerced. Coercion in respect to religious beliefs when brought to bear upon a person who possesses religious convictions may strengthen his commitment to them. In general, however, coercion does not foster the initial development of a particular religious commitment.

A noncoetcive attempt to persuade another to appropriate a religious position may (but, of course, need not necessarily) be contrary to the agapastic attitude. For a corollary of the importance of the agapastic attitude is that ideally each person will be permitted to find a perspective on reality that answers his present existential, spiritual, and intellectual needs, gifts, and aspirations. An attempt to persuade a person to assume a religious position in which he has not expressed an interest may under some circumstances interfere with his personal spiritual quest. Of course, I do not here have in mind the numerous instances of wise missionary work that one encounters. Yet the memory of one’s experiences with ill-conceived missionary zeal may be at least a temporary impediment to the adoption of a religious position in which one might otherwise find spiritual fulfillment.

What teaching activities are compatible with the agapastic attitude and the epistemology of religious conviction? There are three ways in which an individual learns about a religious position and its suitability for him. First, he learns about it from what those who have adopted it tell him. Thus willingness to set forth one’s religious convictions and to answer questions about them is not only compatible with the agapastic attitude and the epistemology of religious conviction but is required by them. Unwillingness to explain one’s religious position and to answer questions about it have accompanied Indian and Chinese religious commitments more frequently than they have accompanied Christianity or Judaism. All the reasons for this lie outside the scope of this paper, though they would be a fruitful subject for ecumenical studies. Some of the reasons, however, are of great import in this context.

The Hindu, Buddhist, and Zen Buddhist unwillingness to articulate religious insights for outsiders derives from the recognition that religion is not primarily an intellectual enterprise. Yet such articulation fosters ecumenism. For an understanding of the teachings of a religious community is an aid in the endeavor to foster its freedom, to increase its roles in the community, and to cooperate with it in community affairs. Also, we have seen that a corollary of the view that there is one reality into which all religions possess some insight is that each religion possesses diStinctive insight into that reality at least some of which can be shared with persons who hold Other religious positions.

Questions pertaining to a particular religious position merit an answer when they arise from the assumption of the agapastic attitude on the part of those who have not accepted that position. Thus the Christian who asks the [Page 55] Buddhist whether he believes in everlasting life and the “eternal validity” of the individual human being in the scheme of things asks questions deriving from a Christian perspective on reality, for the Buddhist perspective does not stress the fundamental importance of the individual. However, if the individual Buddhist possesses sufficient philosophical training to grasp this point, if he assumes the agapastic attitude, and if he judges that the Christian does also, he will attempt to answer the question. Moreover, the Christian who takes no interest in the Buddhist’s answer because it derives from a perspective on life, being, and eternity different from his own is not faithful to the demands of the agapastic attitude. The same holds true for the Buddhist who declines to answer the Christian’s questions because he judges that they derive from the latter’s ecumenism rather than from a desire to adopt Buddhism as a way of life.

Second, one learns about religions other than one’s own through exposure to their beliefs, practices, and values. Ecumenism is fostered by an individual’s visiting religious groups whose beliefs are different from his own. To be sure, there may be limitations either on what any one group judges it is wise to share with outsiders or on what it judges it is able to share with them. For example, the Roman Catholic parish may welcome non-Catholics at Mass but may not be willing to admit them to communion. The person who makes occultism a way of life may, indeed, be unable to share his convictions and experiences with outsiders. Moreover, it is to be expected that members of a religious group will disagree as to which privileges and teachings can be shared. But the existence of such limitations is inherent in many religious positions. And the recognition of the limitations on the part of members of the group and the acceptance of them on the part of outsiders are not only consistent with the agapastic attitude but are required by it.

Third, one learns about a religious position from the behavior, decisions, and commitments of persons who accept it. This is a corollary of what it means to adopt a religious position. Ideally, the individual’s religious commitments and convictions are the source of his values, aspirations, and concerns; are determinative of what he becomes spiritually; and have effects on his moral, intellectual, and aesthetic nature.

The qualification ideally is important because there may be a failure on the part of the individual to live up to the ideals he professes. Perhaps such failure is more prevalent among those who espouse one of the three great Western religions (namely, Judaism, Christianity, and Islám) than among those who espouse a Chinese, Indian, or Western pagan religious position. The reasons for this may lie in epistemological differences between the two families of religions. Typically, Chinese, Indian, and Western pagan religious convictions derive from either mystical encounters with a delimited aspect of reality or the achievement of a particular way of seeing reality. In addition, both mystic experiences and the way of seeing reality are achieved through the individual’s perseverance in a particular discipline that transforms and develops his entire nature. Thus Swami Yogananda calls religion a “science of the spirit” and Swami Nikhilananda declares, “To a Hindu the indubitable proof of [Page 56] God’s existence is experience.” The religious commitment that arises in either or both of these ways is also spiritually transforming so that the individual who grasps the significance, content, and metaphysical ground of the ideals espoused by his religious position is also both willing and able to live by those ideals.

The case is different, however, with Judaism, Christianity, and Islám, which are transcendent theisms for which mystic encounter with the transcendent God is not an essential ingredient in religious conversion. Christianity provides a clue to this distinction between Western pagan religions and Eastern religions, on the one hand, and Western transcendent theisms, on the other: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). As a rule, of course, some spiritual transformation and correlative glimpsing of Christian values accompanies the desire to adopt Christianity. Yet the Christian gives assent to the importance of values and ideals in his own life, in the human predicament, and in the axiological orientation of reality that he is not able to make his own. Examples are the Christian ideals of loving the neighbor as one’s self, of desiring to pray for the enemy, of turning the other cheek, and of having the wisdom to know when to turn the other cheek and when to rebel or to withdraw from the situation. Doubtless the failure of the Christian to achieve these difficult ideals accounts for some of the lack of understanding and appreciation of Christianity among non-Christians.

WHAT of the effects on a religious position of the introduction into it of the agapastic attitude? And what of the effects on the religious convictions and commitments of the individual who adopts the agapastic attitude? The question is important. For, as we have noted, the agapastic attitude is dynamic. It does not leave unchanged either the religious position into which it is introduced or the person who assumes it.

We have seen that any religion into which the agapastic attitude is introduced will be enriched in its understanding of the diversity of religious paths that lead to spiritual fulfillment and of the complex relations among these paths. This increase in understanding can be expected to lead to additional changes. It can reveal that a particular religious group has not adequately interpreted what it accepts as revelation. For example, the Christian community that has interpreted “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matt. 7:14) as pertaining only to Christianity or only to one Christian denomination finds that it has interpreted these words too narrowly. The Vedantist who generously accepts Jesus’ “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) as true, but gives it a pantheistic interpretation and asserts that the individual Vedantist and God are one ontologically has erred in not maintaining the differences between the pantheism of Vedantism and the transcendent theism of ChriStianity.

[Page 57] The person who adopts the agapastic attitude may be able to borrow from another religion. To be sure, not all aspects of any particular religion can be borrowed by a person who accepts another. This last is a corollary of the fact that between any two religions there are irreducible differences. The Zen Buddhist will not achieve the distinctive joy of Christianity, and the Christian will not achieve Satori. Yet the person who adopts a particular religious position may find that he is able to borrow some aspects of another religion, provided he makes proper adaptations in what he borrows. An example of such adaptation is the discovery on the part of some Christians that selected aspects of Yoga meditation practices are an aid in Christian meditation. Clearly these practices must be adapted to Christian purposes, for their original intent is the achievement of union with Brahma interpreted as a pantheistic absolute. This cannot be the intent of the Christian who nonetheless finds in Yoga useful psychological and physiological suggestions. Finally, some insights may be borrowed from a religion that is not one’s own with little or no modification. What in respect to any one religion these are will vary from person to person as well as from religion to religion and also will doubtless be a matter of controversy. Perhaps some Christians and Jews will find that they are able to adapt with virtually no modification the Zen Buddhist philosophy of drawing.

We have examined relations among individuals who accept religious positions that are compatible with the agapastic attitude and who adopt the latter. We need not here explore the relations among persons who refuse to assume the agapastic attitude. At best they will ignore each other; at worst they will destroy each other. Of import here, however, are the relations among those whose support of ecumenism is strengthened by the adoption of this attitude. The nature of these relations will depend on which aspects of the agapastic attitude are lacking from the dialogue among them; on what intellectual and psychological elements supplant these aspects; and on the courage (including, perhaps, physical courage), intellectual perspicacity, creativity, and spititual power of the person who assumes the agapastic attitude.

If the person who does not adopt the agapastic attitude lacks only the willingness to learn about other religions and is not openly hostile to them, there is not likely to be any interaction between him and the person who is committed to another religion and who does adopt the agapastic attitude. However, the person who does assume the agapastic attitude may enter into intellectual combat with those who hold to other religions. He may do this from a variety of motives—for example, from a personal need for intellectual domination, from intellectual curiosity and a desire for intellectual clarity, or from a missionary zeal fostered by his own religious position. For example, twentieth-century instrumentalism, positivism, and metaphysical naturalism each in its own way provided the basis for a way of life that for some people [Page 58] was a surrogate religious position and was also aggressively critical of Jewish and Christian theism. Another example is Suzuki’s harsh criticism of the Christian logos doctrine. In contrast, Martin Buber’s illumination of the pagan and Christian use of the logos is an example of the agapastic attitude.

The person or the group that rejects the agapastic attitude may attempt to suppress all religions save its own. This may take the form of a withholding of religious freedom, such as was practiced by the Inquisition or by American puritanism. It may take the form of compulsory reeducation, such as has been practiced by some Marxist communities. Or it may take the form of destruction of those outside the chosen community, such as was practiced by the Nazis. How the person who has the agapastic attitude meets the destructive opposition depends on his courage, intellectual acumen, and the effects of his religious commitment on his opponents, as well as on the particular circumstances of the situation in which he meets the opposition. If the circumstances are right, and if he has sufficient spiritual power, he may be able to work a change in his opponents. If he can do neither, he may be forced to resist and, perhaps, to accept martyrdom.

To conclude: it is important to stress the role in the agapastic attitude of the irreducible differences among religions. Of course, in some ecumenical situations—for example, in ecumenical religious services—it is wise to stress resemblances among the religions represented and not to draw attention to the differences among them. There are many situations, however, when in the interest of ecumenism it is important to stress differences among religions. There are several reasons why this is so.

First, the distinctiveness of a religious position derives from its distinctive perspective on and insights into man and reality, and these determine the contributions that only that position makes to inquiry into these topics. Second, among those who assume the agapastic attitude an interest in differences among religions has beneficial effects. For example, the Orthodox Christian cherishes a belief in the Trinity, which the Jew and the Unitarian reject. The Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim reject the pantheism cherished by Vedantism and the impersonal law of Taoism. Nonetheless, each will find a spiritual discipline of great effectiveness in the cultivation of an interest in and respect for both the beliefs of Other religions and the people who hold these beliefs.

Third, the cultivation of the interest in and respect for both the beliefs of all religions and for the people who hold these beliefs will require and foster a sense of humor and proportion as well as a perception and appreciation of human dignity. To cultivate the agapastic attitude as I have delineated it here is to be at least implicitly committed to the belief that all religions have delimited yet profound insight into the one reality. There is here an apparent [Page 59] paradox: any one religion discerns only a small part of the vast whole that is objective reality, and yet what is distinctive in that discernment is immeasurably valuable to those who adopt that religion. The paradox, however, is only apparent. It is resolved by two additional facts.

On the one hand, there is a positive analogy between scientific inquiry and the ecumenical interest in all religions. Any one scientific inquiry explores a delimited aspect of the physical world, develops its own modes of investigation, and makes its own contributions to the knowledge of nature. As we have seen, each religion is profitably viewed as deriving from a distinctive perspective on reality, as making particular demands on the people who hold it, and as preparing them for distinctive roles in ecumenism. On the other hand, there is a negative analogy between religion and science. Scientific inquiry as it is understood today does not make demands upon the entire self of the investigator, and science per se is not a way of life. On the contrary, one does not adopt a religious perspective on reality unless he makes it a fundamental commitment in his life and the ground of all his values, aspirations, and hopes.

[Page 60]

Index, Vol. 13, Fall 1978-Summer 1979

Articles are indexed by author and subject. Book reviews are indexed by subject and reviewer, as well as by the book’s author under the heading BOOK Reviews. Fiction, poetry, art, and photographs are indexed by author or artist and only occasionally by subject. Letters to the editor are usually included with entries for the articles to which they refer but may also be indexed by author and/or subject.

ABBREVIATIONS

bibliog	bibliography
bibliog f	bibliographical footnotes
il	illustrated
jt auth	joint author
por	portrait
Spr	Spring
Sum	Summer
Wint	Winter

For those unfamiliar with the form of indexing used, the following example is given:

ENTRY	BAHÁ’Í Faith and other religions Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78
EXPLANATION:	An article, with bibliographical footnotes, entitled “Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith,” by Juan Ricardo Cole, will be found in Volume 12 of World Order on pages 14-28 of the Winter 1977-78 issue. A letter commenting on that article appears in Volume 13 on pages 5-6 of the Fall 1978 issue.

---

ABU’L-FIDÁ

Problems of chronology in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 13:24-39 Spr ’79

The ARTS

Social principle. H. Holley. 12:29-43 Fall ’77; Letter. 13:6-7 Wint ’78-79

BÁBÍS

Persecution

Attacks on Bahá’ís in Iran. editorial. il 13:1-5 Wint ’78-79

Bahá’u’lláh’s prison sentence: the official account. K. Kazemzadeh and F. Kazemzadeh. 13:11-14 Wint ’78-79

BAHÁ’Í Faith

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

Epistemology

Interchange. letter on Bahá’í epistemology and Spinoza. R. Perlin. 13:5-6 Spr ’79

History

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial 13:2-3 Sum ’79

Symbolism

Some aspects of Bahá’í expressive style. A. Bausani. bibliog f 13:36-43 Wint ’78-79

Writings

Problems of chronology in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 13:24-39 Spr ’79

BAHÁ’Í Faith and other religions

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

[Page 61]

Ecumenism and the agapastic attitude. M. C. Rose. bibliog f 13:47-59 Sum ’79

God of Bahá’u’lláh. J. Chouleur. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

BAHÁ’ÍS

Remembering some early Bahá’ís. book review. F. Kazemzadeh, 13:51-2 Wint ’78-79

Persecution

Attacks on Bahá’ís in Iran. editorial. il 13:1-5 Wint ’78-79

Declaration on the State of religious minorities in Iran; Confidential report on the state of the Bahá’í community in Iran. Federation of protestant churches in Switzerland. 13:15-20 Sum ’79

Iran in turmoil. editorial. 13:2-3 Fall ’78

Out of Iran: a call for tolerance. editorial. 13:2 Spr ’79

BAHÁ’U’LLÁH

Bahá’u’lláh’s prison sentence: the official account. K. Kazemzadeh and F. Kazemzadeh. 13:11-14 Wint ’78-79

Continuing the survey of Bahá'u’lláh’s writings. book review. F. Kazemzadeh. 13:57-8 Fall ’78

God of Bahá’u’lláh. J. Chouleur. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

Problems of chronology in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 13:24-39 Spr ’79

BAUSANI, Alessandro

Some aspects of Bahá’í expressive style. bibliog f 13:36-43 Wint ’78-79

BIBLE

Textual Criticism

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

BLOCK, Lori

Photographs. 13:41 Fall ’78; 13:13 Sum ’78

BOOK Reviews

Schaefer, U. The Light Shineth in Darkness: Five Studies in Revelation after Christ. bibliog f 12:35-42 Wint ’77-78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

Taherzadeh, Adib. Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh: Adrianople 1863-68. 13:57-8 Fall ’78

Whitehead, O. Z. Some Early Bahá’ís of the West. 13:51-2 Wint ’78-79

BOWEN, Elizabeth L.

Health, nutrition, and the future of children. bibliog f 13:42-55 Fall ’78

BUCK, Christopher

Forum. letter on Hatcher’s review of Schaefer’s The Light Shineth in Darkness. 13:7-9 Sum ’79

BUSINESS, Moral Aspects of

Work and the economic problem. H. Mahmoudi. bibliog f 13:16-22 Wint ’78-79

CHILDREN

Health, nutrition, and the future of children. E. L. Bowen. bibliog f 13:42-55 Fall ’78

Looking at children’s literature. D. Garey. bibliog f 13:41-50 Spr ’79

CHOLAS, Chris

Photograph. 13:50 Wint ’78-79

CHOULEUR, Jacques

God of Bahá’u’lláh. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

CHRIST

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

God of Bahá’u’lláh. J. Chouleur. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

CHRISTIANITY

Declaration on the State of religious minorities in Iran. Federation of protestant churches in Switzerland. 13:15-20 Sum ’79

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

CIVILIZATION

Social principle. H. Holley. 12:29-43 Fall ’77; Letter. 13:6-7 Wint ’78-79

COLE, Juan Ricardo

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

Interchange. letter on St. Paul. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79

Problems of chronology in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom. bibliog f 13:24-39 Spr ’79

CONRADER, Jay M.

Photograph. 13:14 Spr ’79

DANESH, Hossain B.

Health and healing. bibliog f 13:15-23 Spr ’79

DEATH, Life After

Afterlife and the twin pillars of education. J. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 13:21-37 Fall ’78

DISEASE. See Health and Health Care

DUBOIS, W. E. B.

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial 13:2-3 Sum ’79

[Page 62] DUERSCHMID, Willibald

Forum. letter on St. Paul. 13:6-7 Sum ’79

ECONOMIC Development

International health work. A. K. Neumann and I. M. Lourie. bibliog f 13:9-13 Spr ’79

ECONOMICS

Work and the economic problem. H. Mahmoudi. bibliog f 13:16-22 Wint ’78-79

ECUMENISM. See Religion—Ecumenism

FAITH

Importance of meditation to faith. D. M. Goodman. bibliog f 13:45-9 Wint ’78-79

FEDERATION of protestant churches in Switzerland

Declaration on the state of religious minorities in Iran; Confidential report on the state of the Bahá’í community in Iran. 13:15-20 Sum ’79

FOOD. See Nutrition

GAIL, Marzieh

Forum. letter on St. Paul. 13:9 Sum ’79

GAREY, Dorothy

Looking at children’s literature. bibliog f 13:41-50 Spr ’79

GOD

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

God of Bahá’u’lláh. J. Chouleur. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

Some aspects of Bahá’í expressive style. A. Bausani. bibliog f 13:36-43 Wint ’78-79

GOODMAN, David M.

Importance of meditation to faith. bibliog f 13:45-9 Wint ’78-79

GREGORY, Louis

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

HATCHER, John S.

Afterlife and the twin pillars of education. bibliog f 13:21-37 Fall ’78

HATCHER, William S.

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

HAYDEN, Robert

Theory of evil. poem. 13:23 Wint ’78-79

Year of the child. poem. 13:44-45 Sum ’79

HEALTH and Health Care

Health and healing. H. B. Danesh. bibliog f 13:15-23 Spt ’79

Health, nutrition, and the future of children. E. L. Bowen. bibliog f 13:42-55 Fall ’78

International health work. A. K. Neumann and I. M. Lourie. bibliog f 13:9-13 Spr ’79

HEDIN, Mary

Inheritance: in a churchyard in Sweden. poem. 13:39-40 Fall ’78

Stanislaus. poem. 13:14 Wint ’78-79

HOLLEY, Horace

Social principle. 12:29-43 Fall ’77; Letter. 13 26-7 Wint ’78-79

ILLNESS. See Health and Health Care

ÍRÁN

Attacks on Bahá’ís in Iran. editorial. il 13:1-5 Wint ’78-79

Declaration on the state of religious minorities in Iran; Confidential report on the state of the Bahá’í community in Iran. Federation of protestant churches in Switzerland. 13:15-20 Sum ’79

Iran in turmoil. editorial. 13:2-3 Fall ’78

Out of Iran: a call for tolerance. editorial. 13:2 Spr ’79

ISLÁM

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

Problems of chronology in Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 13:24-39 Spr ’79

JESUS. See Christ

KAZEMZADEH, Firuz

Continuing the survey of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings. book review. 13:57-8 Fall ’78

Remembering some early Bahá’ís. book review. 13:51-2 Wint ’78-79

See also

Kazemzadeh, K., jt auth

KAZEMZADEH, Kazem and Kazemzadeh, Firuz

Bahá’u’lláh’s prison sentence: the official account. 13:11-14 Wint ’78-79

KRIEGER, Klaus Interchange. letter on Holley’s social principle 13:6-7 Wint ’78-79

LIFE After Death. See Death, Life After

LOCKE, Alain

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. E. D. Mason. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78—79; Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

LOURIE, Irvin M.

See Neumann, Alfred K., jt auth

MCLEAN, Jack

Interchange. letter on Jesus as God’s son. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

[Page 63] MAHMOUDI, Hoda

Work and the economic problem. bibliog f 13:16-22 Wint ’78-79

MANIFESTATIONS of God. See Progressive Revelation; Prophets

MASON, Ernest D.

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78—79; Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

MEDICINE. See Health and Health Care

MEDITATION

Importance of meditation to faith. D. M. Goodman. bibliog f 13:45-9 Wint ’78-79

MITCHELL, Glenford E.

Photographs. 13:59 Fall ’78; 13:44, cover Wint ’78-79; 13:3, cover Spr ’79; 13:1 Sum ’79

MOODY, Raymond A.

Afterlife and the twin pillars of education, J. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 13:21-37 Fall ’78

MORRISON, Gayle

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:23 Sum ’79

MURCHIE, Guy. See Book Reviews

NEGROES

Long hot summers of discontent. editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

NEUMANN, Alfred K. and Lourie, Irvin M.

International health work. bibliog f 13:9-13 Spr ’79

NUTRITION. See Health and Health Care

O’REILLY, Camille

Photographs. 13:8 Fall ’78; 13:24 Wint ’78-79; 13:7 Spr ’79; 13:4, 14, 46 Sum ’79

PAUL, Saint

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

PERLIN, Rae

Interchange. letter on Bahá’í epistemology and Spinoza. 13:5-6 Spr ’79

PHILOSOPHY

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. E. D. Mason. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78-79; Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

PHYSICIANS

Health and healing. H. B. Danesh. bibliog f 13:15-23 Spr. ’79

PREJUDICE. See Race Relations

PROGRESSIVE Revelation

Christian-Muslim encounter and the Bahá’í Faith. J. R. Cole. bibliog f 12:14-28 Wint ’77-78; Letter. 13:5-6 Fall ’78

God of Bahá’u’lláh. J. Chouleur. bibliog f 13:9-19 Fall ’78

PROPHETS

Quest for the metaphysical Jesus. book review. W. S. Hatcher. bibliog f 12:35-42 Sum ’78; Letters. 13:7-8 Wint ’78-79, 13:5-9 Sum ’79; Reply. 13:9-12 Sum ’79

Social principle. H. Holley. 12:29-43 Fall ’77; Letter. 13:6-7 Wint ’78-79

RACE Relations

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. E. D. Mason. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78-79. Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

Long hot summers of discontent. editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

RELIGION

Importance of meditation to faith. D. M. Goodman. bibliog f 13:45-9 Wint ’78-79

Ecumenism

Ecumenism and the agapastic attitude. M. C. Rose. bibliog f 13:47-59 Sum ’79

REVELATION, Progressive. See Progressive Revelation

ROSE, Mary Carman

Ecumenism and the agapastic attitude. M. C. Rose. bibliog f 13:47-59 Sum ’79

SCHAEFER, Udo. See Book Reviews

SHAW, R. Gregory

Forum. letter on St. Paul. 13:5-6 Sum ’79

SMITH, Lesley

Photographs. 13:1, 26-7, 40 Spr ’79

SOCIETY

Social principle. H. Holley. 12:29-43 Fall ’77; Letter. 13:6-7 Wint ’78-79

SOCIOLOGY

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. E. D. Mason. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78-79; Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

SOUTH CAROLINA

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

SPINOZA

Interchange. letter on Bahá’í epistemology and Spinoza. R. Perlin. 13:5-6 Spr ’79

[Page 64] STAFFORD, Scott

Photograph. 13:35 Wint ’78-79

SWITZERLAND. See Federation of protestant churches in Switzerland

TAHERZADEH, Adib. See Book Reviews

THOMPSON, Richard

Photographs. 13:1, 7, 20, 38, 56, cover Fall ’78; 13:10, 15 Wint’78-79; 13:8, 51 Spr ’79; 13:cover Sum ’79

UNITED Nations

International Year of the Child

Year of the child. poem. R. Hayden. 13:44-45 Sum ’79

UNITED States. See South Carolina

UNITY in Diversity

Alain Locke’s social philosophy. E. D. Mason. bibliog f 13:25-34 Wint ’78-79; Editorial comments. 13:6 Wint ’78-79

VADER, John Paul

Photograph. 13:9 Wint ’78-79

WASHINGTON, Booker T.

To move the world: Louis Gregory and the advancement of racial unity in America. G. Morrison. bibliog f il 13:21-43 Sum ’79; Editorial comments. 13:4 Spr ’79; Editorial. 13:2-3 Sum ’79

WHITEHEAD, O. Z. See Book Reviews

WHYTE, Patricia M.

Interchange. letter on World Order Magazine’s standard of excellence. 13:4-5 Spr ’79

WORK

Work and the economic problem. H. Mahmoudi. bibliog f 13:16-22 Wint ’78-79

WORLD Order Magazine

Interchange. editorial comments on cover designs, gift subscriptions and renewal cards. 13:4-5 Fall ’78

Interchange. letter on World Order’s standard of excellence. P. M. Whyte. 13:4-5 Spr ’79

[Page 65]

Authors & Artists

ROBERT HAYDEN, who served for two years as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, is a professor of English at the University of Michigan. In 1971 he was awarded the Russell Loines Award for poetry by the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1975 received an award from the Academy of American Poets. Mr. Hayden’s works of poetry include American Journal, Angle of Ascent, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Words in the Mourning Time, Kaleidoscope, Heart-Shape in the Dust, Figure of Time, and A Ballad of Remembrance.

GAYLE MORRISON, who served on the Editorial Board of World Order from Fall 1969 through Fall 1972, makes a welcome return. Ms. Morrison has done graduate work in Southeast Asia studies and holds an M.A. in social education from the University of Massachusetts. Her “Education for Worldmindedness” appeared in our Summer 1971 issue, “Art in Apocalypse” in Summer 1970, and “A Look at Antifeminist Literature” in Spring 1975. She has also published A Guide to Books on Southeast Asian History: 1961-66. Her biography of Louis G. Gregory will be published by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust in late 1980.

MARY CARMAN ROSE is professor of philosophy at Goucher College. Her doctorate is from Johns Hopkins University, her bachelor and master’s degrees from the University of Minnesota. Her publications include some seventy-five articles and Essays in Christian Philosophy. Her “Technology and the Specifically Human” appeared in our Spring 1976 issue and her “The Pilgrims of the Way” in our Summer 1978 issue. Dr. Rose has been a life-long visitor to the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette and says she sees a striking correlation between the progress of the building of that Temple and the growth of ecumenism in our day.

ART CREDITS: Cover, design by John Solarz, photograph by Richard Thompson; p. 1, photograph by Glenford E. Mitchell; p. 4, photograph by Camille O’Reilly; p. 13, photograph by Lori Block; p. 33, photograph courtesy Bahá’í National Archives; p. 46, photograph by Camille O’Reilly.

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