 We have an exciting panel that's been assembled to explore concepts and theories relating to the role of religion in society. Our panelists are Julia Berger, head researcher, Wave Julia. She's a head researcher and writer at the behind our national community's United Nation office in New York. She's also pursuing her dissertation in the field of religion. Benjamin Shuel, associate fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and visiting professor at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. I also happen to know that Ben played high school football with Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks, but Ben chose a different field of action, the field of religion. And we have Emily Goshi from the Department of Religion at Princeton University who's pursuing her PhD in religion, and she's a very humble soul who has actually mastered the Arabic language. It should be conceded at the outset that this is a very large topic, one that could easily be the theme of the entire conference, but the panel in the 90 minutes it has been given will endeavor to sketch out some major themes and open some avenues for reflection and further inquiry. So just a few general thoughts. The understanding of the question of the role of religion in society greatly varies across the globe. In some contexts, the very premise of religion having a role in social formation and social development is a highly contested idea. In other contexts, that religion plays a central role in shaping social reality is taken as axiomatic, but increasingly theorists, civil society leaders, policymakers recognize that religion, whether some like it or not, is a key actor in the public sphere, shaping aspirations, perceptions, and values concerning human action and purpose. Within this frame of understanding, a number of issues emerge, including the proper role of religion in the public sphere, the merits and deficiencies of secularism, how to mediate among diverse identities and value systems so that social unity becomes a realistic possibility, how to define the common good in the context of religious and cultural pluralism, and the appropriate scope and limits of religious expression and religious freedom. Some thinkers contend that discourse in the public sphere is impoverished and indeed distorted by the avoidance or exclusion of religious and spiritual perspectives. The constrained vocabulary and categories of secular discourse fail to adequately convey the full implications of our normative convictions, assumptions, and commitments. Thus, this school of thought argues that the perspective of faith brings true moral awareness and empathetic understanding to the public domain. It is here perhaps where the voice of religion can play a distinctive role in evaluating and shaping the complex terrain of collective life, not in conveying doctrinal or absolute truths, but rather in fostering attitudes, qualities, norms, and capacities that empower all persons to realize their true potential. And it is precisely this approach which currently animates the community-building work of Baha'is in all parts of the planet. In affirming a deep linkage between the material and spiritual dimensions of life, Abdul Baha insisted that religion, quote, must be living, vitalized, moving, and progressive, unquote. As an essential expression of reality, religion is not to be dismissed as an atavistic phenomenon irrelevant to the processes of social advancement. Rather it is a primary force shaping human consciousness, ensuring that humanity's distinctive potentialities, particularly its rational powers, are constructively channeled. It is unsurprising then that from the inception of the Baha'i community, its aims and actions have been informed by an overarching vision of spiritual and social transformation. To revive the world, to enable its life, and regenerate its peoples. In the latter part of the 19th century, Baha'u'llah emphasized the necessity for meaningful collaboration among the governors of society and the world's religions. He wrote, Our hope is that the world's religious leaders and the rulers thereof will unitedly arise for the reformation of this age and the rehabilitation of its fortunes. Let them, after meditating on its needs, take counsel together and through anxious and full deliberation administer to a diseased society its insorily afflicted world the remedy it requires. This call by Baha'u'llah for substantive consultation among secular and religious leaders underscores the idea that social advancement and just governance cannot be realized without directly tapping the spiritual roots of human motivation. To ensure that public policies gain the trust of the generality of humankind, that programs of action, addressing social needs, elicit grassroots participation, that an ethic of service to the common good is inculcated, that freedom of conscience flourishes in the milieu of social diversity and peaceful coexistence, and that rectitude of conduct characterizes all facets of public life, the active involvement of religious communities in public discourse is not only relevant but would seem essential. It is through constructive engagement, therefore, in the public sphere that secular and faith leaders will arrive at new understandings of what is possible for human beings and how peaceful patterns of collective life can be fostered. And Baha'u'llahs, of course, as we heard last night in the marvelous presentation by Mr. Razavi, Baha'u'llahs are seeking to contribute to this vital endeavor in a variety of ways. So now we're going to do is jump in and we're going to hear from our panelists and start by asking them to describe their particular research interests in the field of religion and what's motivated them to pursue these lines. So maybe we can start with Juliana. Thank you, Matt. That was a really helpful overview and I think it sets the stage very nicely for the comments and some of the discussion here this morning. So broadly speaking, my research interest is looking at religious entities at the United Nations or more broadly, religion and international affairs. And while the UN is, of course, a secular entity and, in fact, the entire field of international relations operates within the secular framework, there's a very substantial, very visible and very much felt presence of religion in the UN system. And this can be whether you're looking at it from the governmental perspective. There are 193 member states at the UN. Over 50 of them are part of, for example, of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that votes as a bloc. So these are countries that are defining themselves under the banner of Islam. There is, of course, the Holy See that represents the Catholic Church and is a permanent observer mission at the UN. There are, of course, the debates at the UN where the UN is struggling with issues of religious extremism, of violence in the name of religion, of issues of the deformation of religion. These topics are increasingly present in the debates. There is also the entire body of non-governmental organizations, NGOs, approximately 4,000 that have a formal relationship with the UN of which about 400 are religious organizations which have privileges of taking part in UN debates and contributing their faith perspectives. So really what only 10 years ago might have seemed out of place or questionable, today is really very much an accepted facet of the discourse at the UN. So my particular focus, since we can't study the entire field of religion at the UN, is the Bahá'í international community and its relationship with the UN over the past 70 years. And as you may know, the Bahá'í international community is the body that represents the worldwide Bahá'í community, its vision and its experiences to the United Nations. And it has what's called consultative status with the UN and privileges, again, to engage with member states, with other NGOs, and has been doing that for many decades. As you heard in Mr. Razavi's presentation yesterday, this relationship is actually preceded by the International Bahá'í Bureau, which was created in the 1920s and was recognized by the League of Nations. And if you want to go back further, of course, we have the examples of Bahá'u'lláh, Abdu'l-Bahá, and Shobi Effendi and everything they've written about our engagement in the public sphere. So, okay. So basically, I'm asking the question, if we look at this relationship over the past 70 years with the UN, what are some of the new insights that we're going to gain that we don't gain by looking at Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Jewish organizations with the UN? And how can the experience of the BIC shed light on some of these most pressing issues or some of the most pressing questions surrounding what is the role of religion in international affairs, and how is it carried out? My training is in philosophy, and my area of interest is primarily on the debates that are ongoing about the nature of secularization, the relationship between the changing place of religion in the modern world, and some of the new characteristics of modern discourse, of modern science, of rationality that have really taken on greater prominence and really been crystallized since and after the European Enlightenment. So these debates about the changing place of religion in the modern world. And what got me interested in this line of questioning was my involvement in the Baha'i Faith, quite obviously we have some thoughts about the changing place of religion in the modern world. We think it is changing, it ought to change, it ought to change in certain ways. We're trying to help it change in those ways. We ourselves are aware of the fact that our understanding of religion is quite limited and that we're struggling under the guidance of the House of Justice to gradually create a new pattern of religious life, a new kind of religious community. And so beyond our own efforts though, we also know that there are forces operating in the world that are transforming every aspect of society, every aspect of human life. And for myself, as I was trying also to understand how as a Baha'i I could contribute to this, the transformation and development of a Baha'i community that more adequately reflects the vision of Baha'u'llah, I also became incredibly fascinated with, well, how could I really understand in a rigorous and precise manner these forces that are acting in the world today, particularly around the phenomenon of religion? How are they operating? What kind of transformations are they making? But then even deeper, how do we see them as emerging out of these broader processes of historical transformation that are also spoken about in the Baha'i writings? How could we conceptualize those? How could our framework of history actually be described with scientific precision? And it's an incredibly challenging thing. But I think often we accept some of these ideas, but then if we were really pushed to see, well, literally how did this happen? What happened a thousand years ago, 2,000 years ago? How through historical analysis could we show that this happened? What would be the concepts we would use? How might we do it in a different way than other people? I just realized how far, vastly far, my own understanding was from the ability to speak with that degree of confidence and certainty. And that really shaped my interest in getting involved in these very rich debates about religion and modernity and whatnot. Is this on? Yes? OK. My specific research interests include Islam in the modern world, specifically Muslim communities in the modern Persian Arabian Gulf region. So Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait. And I suppose initially I got into the field because I grew up as a part of this generation where our first encounter with Islam was this rhetoric on Islamic extremism, terrorism, violence after 9-11. But I was also fortunate enough to have a number of Muslim friends growing up. And the contrast between what I was hearing about Islam through the public discourse and what I was seeing through the lives of my Muslim friends really got me excited about learning more about this religion. And I started studying the Arabic language and then realized that to learn Arabic and to really understand the language, you have to understand so much about Islam. And then from studying Islam, I realized that it's not enough to just study Middle Eastern history and the language and some of the broad outlines of Islamic history, but that it's important to also understand what this means as a system of belief for a group of people. And that's what led me to broader religious studies, which is now the department that I'm working in. Can you hear me now? Hello? Yeah, okay. So now maybe what we can do is explore some of the main concepts and major concerns that researchers in the field of religion are working on as relates to religion's role in society. And which of these concepts or areas of interest or perhaps represent fruitful possibilities for a high engagement? Yeah, so there were a few concepts that I thought would be particularly helpful to mention here. And the first is this discourse on the secular, secularization. And then also this new concept that's begin to emerge, which is that of the post-secular. So broadly speaking, the idea of secularization or the secularization thesis as it's called, is the expectation that as the forces of modernity advance, religion will undergo a process of marginalization and decline. The more modern we become, the less religious we are. Now this vision of secularization is closely tied to an ideology of secularism, which is often a political project to forcibly restrict and limit the ability of religion to participate in the public sphere. So these have, over the past 150 years, and the West and the Western Academy have operated as a paradigm of sorts for understanding the role of religion in society. You know, over the past several decades, they've become quite profoundly disrupted. It's quite obvious that many modernizing societies are not becoming less religious by any means. That religion is still playing a prominent role and in fact, an increasingly prominent role in many settings. So this has created a kind of perplexity, which one can describe as a post-secular problematic, which is to say, after the failure of secularization theory as a historical framework for thinking about the changing place of religion in the modern world, and after the failure of secularism as a political project for guiding modern society, how ought we to think about religion and its place in the world today? And so there's a very vibrant and interesting body of discourse that's taking place under the category of the post-secular that's exploring these questions. And I think that is one concept that's particularly helpful and fascinating to engage. Nevertheless, it does remain very Western centric. It has its limitations. But still, it provides an interesting space in which to engage. Yeah, two other concepts I'll mention briefly, and closely related to that is this notion of multiple modernities, which some very prominent sociologists of religion and theorists of religion have advanced. And this is closely related to the line that I was mentioning before. But the notion of multiple modernities is about the idea that there's not only one way to be modern. In fact, the secularization thesis emerges historically from the assumption that Western Europe, and particularly a few societies in Western Europe, they had discovered what it means to be modern. If one is going to modernize, when does it become more like Western Europe? So you have this very kind of clear linear path of development, whereas societies as they're growing, they're becoming more complex, socioeconomic development, political change, they're gonna become more like Western Europe. But then you start to see, well, actually, as some societies that are quite indubitably modern, they're not behaving like Western European states or cultures. I mean, the United States is the obvious example. Religion has and continues to play a very prevalent and prominent role in the United States. But even within Europe itself, you have Ireland, you have Poland, you have Russia, you have Romania, very, very different, both between themselves, but also in relation to this ideal European model. Then you add into the mix Japan and China and India and Brazil, and it gets more complex still. So this notion of multiple modernities has created a framework in which people can start to think, well, what are the defining characteristics of these various modern configurations? And we begin to see that the notions of the secular or of the role of religion in society, they're all very different in these different settings. So we don't just have one hegemonic model that we must either accept or reject. We can either become modern and secular or anti-modern and fanatical and fundamentalistic. There's a panoply of options and possibilities. So, yeah, another concept which has been really interesting has been about the construction of the concept of religion in general. When I say religion in general, I mean religion as this universal category. There is such a thing as Hindu religion, as Buddhist religion, as Muslim religion, as Greek religion. Actually, there's a history to this concept and people have begun to document this history and to tell the story of how that framework emerged. And it's really one of the sort of the hot topics in intellectual history related to religion today. And the kind of arguments people are presenting try to show that actually this discourse on religion, it seems to emerge as these early modern European missionaries and scholars are participating in this process of proto-colonialization, which then becomes colonialism outright not long after. And as they're encountering these diverse cultures and peoples, they're trying to sort of make sense of these aspects of their society or some of their teachings or how does it relate to Christianity. And gradually this notion of, well, there's religion. And they have different aspects or they have different kinds of religion. And they start to then, the study of different religions or comparative religion begins to emerge. And in one sense that can seem very like a normal thing to happen. But the really interesting thing that some of these historians have begun to show is that when you start digging into it, you realize one in that framework as it emerges in the West, there are assumptions about the differentiation of religion from the other aspects of society, which is to say, well, there's religion, and there's science, and there's politics, and there's art. But actually when you go in many non-Western settings, particularly during that time and even today, but also particularly if you go back more deeply into history, you don't find such differentiation. You can't just say, well, there was Greek religion and Greek religion was different to Greek philosophy and Greek science and Greek politics. Actually what you find is a mix in which part and parcel of what it means to be Greek in the ancient times was to have a certain relationship with the gods, with certain rituals, with certain ideas. And so this has created a context in which people are starting to say, well then, how do we think about these aspects of human existence and life if this Western model that assumes a certain separation from religion from the rest of our lives isn't really the case? Now again, I think you can go too far with this and people try to throw away the term religion. And they overlook the fact that it wasn't just Westerners who sort of created this and forced it upon the rest of the world. Actually, even centuries before there were similar developments happening in the Islamic world at the same time in Japan and India and China. People are also developing general notions of religion. It was a very different notion, but nevertheless they were developing them. So again, we see that there are strengths and weaknesses, but nevertheless it's interesting. So I'll leave it there. So this picks up I think on some of the points that Ben was making. There are certainly efforts within the academy to try to describe what is happening and to try to explain why is religion suddenly resurgent? Why has it suddenly found its way into the highest levels of deliberation and what is happening? And it's interesting because I think one of the defining characteristics of that discourse within international affairs is one of fear and anxiety. And it's not difficult to find it if you just look at the titles of some of the leading books that are describing what's happening. So one for example, a book titled God's Century, Resurgent Religion and Global Politics, is claiming that the 21st century is God's century in the sense that now religious organizations and actors of all kinds are enjoying this greater capacity for political influence. And they're claiming that this is to an extent greater than at any other time in modern history. And they warn that God's partisans are back. They are setting the political agenda and they're not going away. Others and other international relations scholars are tending to conceive of religion as something deviant and irrational and a set of ideas that are propelling radical non-state actors into conflict. So underlying this discourse, you can see that there's this pushback from those who have assumed and taken comfort in the solidly comfortable secular stance that we have all grown up with. And now, as Ben mentioned, we're at a transitional time. To say it's secular no longer adequately captures the dynamics and the reality. It's something that's post-secular, but we're not exactly sure what it is. And so this anxiety expresses itself in descriptions of religion as being resurgent almost as a foreign body in the secular space. And I guess one question we can ask is why is the narrative being shaped this way? And I suppose one way we can think about it is that the way religion has pushed itself into the public consciousness has been driven by very jarring, violent attacks. So we can think of the 1979 revolution in Iran. We think of the attacks of September 11th. And these are the kinds of events that really made political scientists take notice and they started trying to write about it and theorize and say what was happening. So as Baha'is, though, if we think back to, for example, the March 2nd, 2013 letter that the House of Justice wrote to the Baha'is of Iran about involvement of the Baha'i faith in political affairs in politics. We are given this very different understanding of history and an understanding of the dynamics that are shaping our world. And so in that sense, as Baha'is, we have a very different narrative. A narrative that is much more optimistic. A narrative that doesn't paralyze us with fear. And that gives us a way of making sense of the forces that we see that are destructive and that are tearing communities apart. But at the same time, it doesn't give us a blind spot, which is present in so many other analyses, to the other set of processes that are bringing about greater degrees of consensus and integration and movements that we would consider to be constructive. Another set of questions that emerges in the discourse is this question of causality, which is, does religion shape society or is society shaped by religion? And this is one of the questions that has come up in conversations with my advisor, who's not a Baha'i, he's a Quaker. And so what he's been interested in is, well, where do these Baha'i ideas emerge? Do they emerge from the matrix of Iranian reformist thought in the 19th century? Where are they coming from? Who were they influenced by? What happened when the Baha'i faith went to the West? Was it fundamentally changed and altered? And so again, there are these concepts that we have where it's neither one nor the other. It's a much more holistic and rich understanding of what's happening as concepts become applied in society and as they are tested and as they are gradually revealed by our central figures to a Baha'i community that is continually evolving and growing. So those are some of the concepts I wanted to mention. In the field of Islamic studies, I think a lot of the same subjects that they've touched on are relevant. Specifically though, the interesting thing that happens when you move over to Islamic studies is that these broader discourses on the history of religion, the trajectory of secularism, or of the secular in society looks very different. So this standard idea that at some point, people were really thinking that religion wasn't going to be so important, governments were moving away from that, and then there was this eventual resurgence of religion, that trajectory doesn't map on to the Islamic world so well. And I think newer and more modern discourses on the secular are doing a better job of taking that into consideration. But it's really interesting to see now scholars of Islam and scholars of not Christianity and Judaism thinking about these issues as well and how that transforms the way that we talk about these general trends of religion. In addition, sort of specifically in the field of Islamic studies, scholars are very concerned with issues of radicalization, extremism, trying to find what really is the essence of Islam. Can Islamic law and or Islamic society be compatible with the modern world and with modern sort of liberal values? Islam and gender is a tremendous question. And a lot of these questions, I think there are sort of two major ways in which, at least in my experience so far, the Baha'i revelation and the Baha'i dispensation have really helped me to approach some of these questions. And the first way is just that a lot of these questions ultimately boil down to the elimination of prejudice and bigotry in all its forms. So when we ask the question, when we're looking at, for example, radicalization, extremism, sectarianism, what we're really asking at the core is, why do these people not get along? Or why are these people able to get along despite their differences? And, or for example, when we think about Islam and gender, a lot of it boils down to just trying to find the equality of men and women, or trying to explain its absence. So in that sense, naturally, the Baha'i dispensation, which is so focused on the elimination of prejudice in all its forms, has so much to offer. And so just by having that broader framework for these questions, that's really helpful. I think the second major way in which I've been able to conceive of the revelation relative to these questions is that having a broader conception of the role of religion and society as we find, I think, in the Baha'i writings, it forces us to complicate our understanding of these questions. So when we think about, I'll take Islam and gender for an example here. If we're comparing the role of women in Islam to the role of women in modern, liberal Western society, we get a very clear understanding of who lines up where and who's better, what's right, what's wrong. And it gives us clear-cut answers sometimes. But in the Baha'i faith, we know that we're not supposed to use the measures of modern society to judge revelation. So, yes, from a Baha'i standpoint, we can recognize that the role of women in Islam may not be the real role of the ideal gender relationship for the modern world. However, we cannot rush to condemn certain aspects of Islamic law or Islamic tradition because they don't line up with Western liberal principles. So as an example, in Islamic law, men and women do not inherit equally. So lots of people would point to that and say, well, that's a sign that the role of women in Islam is not appropriate for the modern world. Well, if the Baha'i dispensation is the most appropriate religion for our time, we have to acknowledge the fact that men and women don't inherit equally in the Baha'i faith. So that forces us to reflect on the fact that maybe our conception of real, you know, maybe the lofty standard of the equality of men and women that the dispensation brings us is not something that we can reach by just looking at common conceptions of gender equality in, you know, liberal Western society, right? So that really, I think, helps us in Islamic studies. So, yeah, just maybe to clarify, so in the Akdass, there's the provision for inheritance, but actually the choice is ultimately up to the individual. So in fact, I think Bahá'u'lláh is saying that there is equality, but there are some very mystical aspects to that provision in the Akdass. Okay. Well, just to build off, thank you very much. One, what you just said, Emily, maybe to look a little bit more about how the Baha'i revelation or a conceptual framework emerging from the revelation helps you read this discourse or this field of study. How has it helped your methodology? So one question, for example, would be we have a very challenging idea that emerges from the writings that religion is, in fact, a system of knowledge and practice that complements rational inquiry, that in fact scientific methodologies, rational methodologies are not sufficient in informing us whether or not specific norms or goals can allow us to achieve a particular social objective. We need something more than scientific rationality to achieve that. So we are understanding that religion as a knowledge system is pretty important. So can you maybe comment about that overall, how it's helping you inform your work and revelation, the conceptual framework? All of you. Let me, Julie, I go first, yeah. Well, I think, so again, from the area that I'm most familiar with, if we look at how religion is being approached in the study of international relations, that definition is about as far as you could get from the status quo. The way that religion has been approached is one as in its best manifestations is as an entity that facilitates the agendas and goals of secular entities. And so here we would see, for example, development organizations recognizing the capabilities of religious organizations in the field of development, whether it's service delivery or the ability to win the trust of villagers or the people that agencies are hoping to serve. So in that case, religious organizations become as instruments of being able to implement these other agendas. And really, there's no attention paid to the religious component. They become vehicles in this larger agenda. Another way that religion is studied in the social sciences is also from a very materialistic perspective. So studies that have looked at, for example, religion at the UN have decided that the best way to understand religious actors is to, for example, count how many times they meet with member states or to see what meetings they attend in order to determine what their agenda is or to see what kinds of lobbying strategies they have. And it really never acknowledges that there's something worthy of study at the level of the vision, the perspective on reality, on what is it that is driving these organizations to work in this manner? Why is it that they're choosing to work in those particular areas? So I think to say that religion is a knowledge system is to elevate it in many ways to what we know about science. And right now, I think in the social sciences, religion is still, it's not given that credit. And as such, we have this blind spot. And even we don't have the language to really describe and ask the questions about religious organizations in that way. So I'll say a few things about this idea of religion as a system of knowledge and then I'll talk about how the revelation has influenced my own efforts and research. So when we offer a statement like religion is a system of knowledge, it's a definition. But one interesting thing to think about is what are we actually defining? We say religion is. Now when we say religion is, are we talking about the religions that exist in the world today are systems of knowledge and practice? I think maybe not. Are we saying that religion has always throughout history at every moment been a system of knowledge and practice? Maybe not. Are we saying religion ought to be a system of knowledge, it ought to operate as a vibrant and vital system of knowledge? I think definitely. Are we saying religion at its best throughout history at certain moments has reached that level where you can really speak of knowledge and describe it in those terms? I think yes. So then I think as we're speaking about this and we're using this framework, we have to understand that most people when they offer definitions of religion they're offering descriptive definitions. They say religion is and they're trying to say well what's a definition I could give that could encompass everything that anyone calls religion in the world today? Religion is a series of rituals that have to do with separating the sacred from the mundane. Okay, now that can include an intense and extensive variety of phenomena. And then, but then when we speak about science and people are saying well science is they offer not a descriptive definition. They're not trying to say anything that anyone does that tries to gain knowledge about the natural world, that's science. That would include shamanism, that would include alchemy, that would include all sorts of things. They would say no science is it has certain ideals and when you're pursuing those scientific ideals and methods and approaches that's what science is. So you might say science has a normative definition. There's something ideal about what it is to pursue science. And I think then when we speak of religion as a system of knowledge we're also offering a normative definition of religion. Religion ought to do certain things. It ought to behave in certain ways. It ought to be characterized by certain features and processes and dynamics and when it's not, it's not ultimately religion. So I think just to clarify some of the tensions we may encounter if we try to sort of fling that definition around without sort of greater thought. And then on the question of how the revelation and the conceptual framework which the Baha'i community has been building in its attempt to translate the revelation into reality influences my own research. You know the way I've thought to use it is as a kind of a search light which is to say that as I read the writings and I study the guidance I have certain, I get in certain insights about the direction that I need to go. I don't really know how that will happen, what it will look like, what the reality will ultimately be like when I look at it more closely but I know it's that way. There are certain points that I have to reach though I don't know exactly how I will. So then that allows me to go out and to engage the literature and as I do that I start to try to understand the different contours of the literature but then I'm also animated by the conviction that many of these, if not all of these prominent contributions to the intellectual discourse on religion and philosophy and these things, they're all animated by some degree of truth. These very intelligent, well-read, empirically-oriented thinkers, they don't believe things for no reason. Usually there's some reason there and that if I can really understand that reason that I will also then be led closer to the truth which ultimately is expressed in the revelation of Baha'u'llah but then also you know that everyone has certain limitations as well so then I have to be very attentive to what those limitations are. So then with this kind of search light of my evolving understanding of the revelation which is maturing as I both read the writings and the guidance and study the literature as well, I also am trying to sort of map the contours of the literature both in its strengths and its weaknesses and the resultant picture that begins to emerge is moving closer and closer to the vision presented in the revelation. Obviously it's not like oh I read five books and now I can tell you this is how progressive revelation works. No, I mean this is generation after generation after generation of thinker that slowly, slowly we move closer towards that but nevertheless in my own research I found that that approach has allowed me to both contribute to the discourse that I'm involved in to shape it in a way and actually you do make a distinctive contribution because you see things that other people don't see. We have this conceptual framework, we have the guidance of the writings even if we're really just trying to understand the way the discourse is working at strengths and weaknesses we'll see things that no one else will see but then at the same time it also helps us begin to understand the revelation a bit more clearly it also makes it easier for perhaps other young Baha'is or other Baha'is who are trying to make their way through the literature to see how it works, what might be some helpful angles, what might be some lines of research that could be productive and in that way at least I'm still very young in my research but I feel like it's been proceeding well. A lot of these points obviously map very well onto the conversation on Islam. I think in particular there are sort of to make it much more simple than it is there are sort of two broad camps within the academic discourse on Islam and one of them says something along the lines of you know if you get down to the core of the issue everything that we see Muslims do for example the violence the extremism in other cases the peace the tolerance those things exist because they are inherent with Islam there's something about the essence of Islam that produces these different phenomena in different places at different times and then there's another camp that says no Islam isn't really anything at its core it's a text a text doesn't have its own life everyone who comes to this text brings something new to it and we get different phenomena as a result of different social and historical context there's really nothing to Islam at its core and this concept of religion as a system of knowledge and practice I think it pulls us far outside of this binary that we see in the field and it allows us to reconceptualize what does it mean to talk about Islam as a religion if we think about it as a system of knowledge and practice that complicates what we've been talking about oh so I'm a very junior scholar I'm still working through my PhD I don't have really a methodology yet but I'm sure that when I develop one it will be influenced by the revelation maybe just one comment and this follows on what Ben was saying what I found and I've learned a lot of this from Ben actually is that we relate to other theories and the contributions of other scholars I think in a way that is much different from what I'm seeing in academia often I find that the department that I'm in or my advisor is asking me to show why other theories are limited or why they're wrong and then so much of your contributions as a scholar is by showing what you're doing is better it's more enlightening and again underlying it there's this kind of contest for who can see reality better who can articulate in a more compelling way but I think what is different about the Baha'i approach is that we do acknowledge that these contributions have merit and that in fact they enrich each other and that and we don't take the stance of an us versus them so they are part of our conversations in that sense there's an appreciation for those contributions and then my understanding is that the Baha'i revelation helps us to understand this is what Ben was saying too or the limitations of the application of some of those theories but it's a fundamentally different relationship that you have with the community of scholars and I think it's much more in line with the way we're thinking about collaboration and trying to remove some of those trying to replace that culture of competition with something that ultimately in the future will be much more collaborative one of the aspects of our evolving conceptual framework it has many different dimensions as Mr. Razavi delineated for us one of the things that one of the elements of a conceptual framework is a set of concepts and we might even call them immutable concepts or fundamental concepts for us and one example of that is the notion of the oneness of humanity another one is that there is in fact a single force a single creator to what extent are you finding scholars religious scholars moving to that understanding in some way when you look at the literature and you begin to read widely and deeply you find that there are certain voices that come closer to certain aspects of our conceptual framework than others and then the challenges for those that help us we gain insights from those theories and they help us both clarify our understanding of the revelation but then they also help us understand different ways one could sort of modulate the ongoing discourse emphases one can make tools one can use resources one can cite so I think on many of these concepts one finds voices one finds certain thinkers that you can draw on questions of oneness is complex partially because our own understanding of this very profound yet challenging concept is limited but always there's ways to advance our understanding thinkers that can help us go forward I think also with this notion of how does one have a sophisticated understanding of spiritual forces that operate in human history that lend themselves to the gradual advancement of human consciousness and capacity the transformation periodically of civilization in fundamental and profound ways that lead to the emergence of new qualities new realities new phenomena so yeah I think one finds voices but it's not the mainstream by any means nevertheless there are starting to be on some some of these topics thinkers that one can really draw upon who are well respected who are presenting really viable frameworks and so I mean yeah I'm not sure if there's much more to to say about it I've been thinking about with the framework through some of the conversations I've had recently with some colleagues in the UN community is that the framework gives us a particular understanding of a process of change and how the Baha'i community is trying to bring about that process of change so that's one thing it also it is also like a lens in that we're going to see things differently we're going to assign importance to certain things that those coming at the same social phenomenon are not going to see they will value other things so for example the comment that this person had made who knows the work of the Baha'i international community very well she said well a lot of what you're doing is in a way invisible and I think she didn't mean that it's ineffectual but because of the lot of the changes at the level of culture we are trying to comport ourselves differently we're trying to put in place processes that enable a certain culture of discourse to emerge a certain type of dialogue that is not antagonistic that is not us versus them that is not positional which characterizes 99% of what happens across the street at the UN and because the framework that she's coming from that wouldn't register that there's not a value placed on that and so I think the conceptual framework then is also helping to shed light on what are some of those key constituents of change and the way that we want to bring that change about and again they're all arising out of the principle of the oneness of humanity so they're very consistent in terms of means and ends and that might registers being invisible to some others and in fact she also went on to say that somehow I mean she was frustrated because she sees the behind her national community does great work but she said somehow it's not disruptive enough you know she used that term because when you're talking with you know human rights activists and others who are working for social change there's a sense that the status quo has to be disrupted and it has to be torn down because that's what we're familiar with that's what we have decided works in some cases so I think that's very interesting for us to be aware of and obviously the letter on engagement and politics speaks so beautifully and eloquently to this and says it's not about what we don't do it's about these things that we do that unless you understand you're not even going to see so okay so maybe we can after last night I was thinking I need a t-shirt that says I am trying to lead a coherent life please ask me so let's maybe chat a little bit about coherence in your work your research to the extent that you know what has your experience how has your experience perhaps in being involved in community building processes affected your research your understanding your perceptions what do you see as the relationship between research that is more academically based versus research that maybe flows from action community based research an expansion of consolidation in my own experience it's where we really gain our familiarity with this conceptual framework many people ask well where is this conceptual framework where do we learn about it how do I understand what it says and it's not like some secret thing that's tucked away in a tower and you know only a few people get access to it it structures everything that's happening in expansion consolidation today it's animating the Ruhi Institute one finds it in the messages of the House of Justice but it's also not the kind of thing that one can just study in an armchair when you go out and try to translate it into reality its contours and textures become real you begin to perceive them and understand them you also begin to understand the way these organic processes by which this these processes of expansion and consolidation mature and grow and develop and so yeah one starts to develop that way of thinking and that way of perceiving reality and also that consciousness of these forces that are available to us in every aspect of our lives and again when one goes into academic research you're dealing with the same conceptual framework you're just perhaps emphasizing different aspects of it you're trying to zoom in on certain aspects of it see how they relate to certain facets of reality in a different way but nevertheless the consciousness of that conceptual framework is essential to any kind of profound area of intellectual endeavor I think also in expansion and consolidation you really gain familiarity with what it means to generate knowledge we talk about religion as a system of knowledge well that's really one of the key places in which that knowledge is being generated today I mean for anyone who's been deeply involved in it the amount of reflection and sort of very close attention paid to every minutiae and aspect of our activities and you find your understanding evolving and developing very rapidly and you begin to discern general characteristics certain patterns and then as this is happening all over the world those are correlated we get broader patterns broader ideas are filtered back down to us and one really feels that they're participating in a profound and sophisticated process of knowledge generation that mirrors if not even exceeds what's going on in the scientific community today and so to be aware of what knowledge in that sense looks like it also allows one to really understand the difference between kind of intellectual posturing in which one says something interesting or writes like a sensational argument and that slow kind of patient attention to certain a certain facet of reality that allows one to really come away with something one could could speak of as knowledge in the end and one's writing and one's books and one's research so yeah I mean in my in my own life the two have just been sort of intimately wetted and the way I actually came to certain understand ideas about what kind of questions in my intellectual activity would be worth pursuing also arose out of my growing awareness of the needs of humanity today which was born out of a a very close involvement in the processes of expansion and consolidation trying to understand the vision of social change that's presented in the writings and the intention of the House of Justice and their guidance and then I just begin to kind of say well these were some interesting questions these are things that I don't understand these are things that seem to be really plaguing the societies in which I'm living and that then shaped my own intellectual research as well I really like thinking about the relationship between the process of expansion and consolidation and research in Islamic studies for a number of things so first we know that the process of expansion and consolidation is not an individual effort it's collective our learning is collective everything we do is in partnership with communities with institutions but the the real driving force in the academy is you know personal ambition the desire for success the ego is rooted in so much of what we do it's about putting your name on things publishing something that people will will respect getting a tenure track job and if we really try to think about how to make the academic endeavor more consistent with expansion and consolidation I suspect that that's one of the first characteristics that we'll have to go in addition there's a sort of more of a need for a systematic approach a systematic approach that functions in unity so in the field of Islamic studies you see you know people not necessarily all contributing to something with a sense of a unified vision but rather you see opposing camps that you know set up their own corners and really work to fight each other and cut down each other's scholarship and rip it apart now some of that is you know sort of just health a healthy critical attitude and questioning you know what's going on but some of it becomes so polarized that it can almost feel like partisan politics and that's certainly not productive so to think about how we might function in a more unified way is also really important and of course to envision what we do in the academy as being deeply involved with the life of the community that's something many scholars I think in my field don't really ask that question they're not necessarily concerned with how what we learn about Islam might impact the broader world and part of the reason why that's so common now is because the field of Islamic studies has a history of being deeply related to politics and of having very negative outcomes so for example the idea of the clash of civilizations that Islam is inherently against the West and that in the next you know this doctrine came out a couple decades ago and deeply informed the Bush doctrine so scholars of Islam have been working very closely with politicians in different ways and what we've seen come out of that has really caused a lot of other scholars to step back and say okay we need to just stick to our books and theorize and be a lot more careful about this but you know there are other scholars for example who and I would imagine from a Baha'i framework we might so at a personal level for example I'm really interested in thinking about how scholarship about Islam maybe Islam as a system of knowledge and practice could actually help dispel a lot of the prejudice against Islam in the world and could also help us understand what's going on you know in terms of extremism terrorism but also on the other hand tolerance and progress helping us understand how are those phenomena really related to Islam and and then putting that message out in the public so for example some scholars will go into high schools and talk about you know do like a crash course in Islam just to sort of put the you know the idea out there that maybe not all Muslims or terrorists there's a couple ways one thing it makes me think of is first of all I think the question is excellent and when I was writing down my notes in preparation for today I couldn't come up with an answer but I just kept saying this is such a great question if only we all ask that question we would already be so far ahead but the question of of creating coherence between the two makes me think about the gap that exists between what happens in academia and what happens at the community level and I was just speaking with a friend of mine who was Muslim and she was saying you know there's so much fantastic scholarship happening in the area of feminism and Islam and women taking the scripture reinterpreting it thinking about it really challenging certain patriarchal interpretations and norms and she said well what does that mean in a country where 40% of the women are literate and the only conversations you're having are in cafes and on the sidewalks that's not where you're going to find these academics and so it really brought this point home of how huge that divide is obviously it's bigger in countries where literacy is a barrier but just in general there is the sense of academics being more being more removed from the community so I think the second way that that the idea of coherence I was thinking about was in terms of identity I think we pour so much of ourselves if we're in academia and studying and writing that that really shapes who we think we are and to also be someone who is engaged at the community level and has that direct engagement with people and with processes of change and consultation and action and reflection I think it changes how you see yourself as a protagonist in the world it's very it's enriching it's healthy and it's empowering I found that to be my experience and I think the other question of coherence also has to be one with family I mean I have two daughters and a husband who works very long hours and so we're always talking about you know what does this decision to pursue a doctor and how is that coherent with the goals of our family and what what sacrifices do others have to make in order for this to become realized so I see that connection as being very intimate between community and family and the kinds of choices that we're making for our lives and the last comment has to do with what Emily was saying about this collective dimension of community life and that's something else I've noticed in academia is it's such a lone sport I mean you're just you're you're thinking you're by yourself you're rewarded for coming up with your own ideas you know God forbid somebody else should have thought it you know three minutes before you because then it's too bad for you they're going to publish and you're not and so I I feel very fortunate to have had the experience of working with working and thinking together with other behais and and sort of experiencing what a collaborative intellectual effort looks like where you're not competing and I've I've felt that sense of competition in different research departments where I've worked and any other academic endeavors where I've been advised to write and publish more quickly because the others are coming you know and they'll also think of it too so there's this kind of paranoia I think that's out there so those are some elements so the the academic social space is a unique space it has you've touched on some of its aspects but how have you sort of grappled with the issue of your identity as behais and trying to pursue the research lines that you are pursuing so that would be one aspects relating to the space the other more broad one would be what are some of the the challenges that you've encountered and trying to apply insights from the revelation to your work whether in terms of theory or methodology do your colleagues your advisors know that your behais you have this particular understanding and I think what's interesting in Islamic studies is so yes all of my advisors my professors they know that I'm a behai and of course the behai faith has had a bit of a a tenuous relationship with Islam in certain places and in certain times in history to say the least and what's interesting is you would think that scholars of Islam would know more about the faith than they do and I think sometimes once you get into the academy you have this just expectation that because someone's a senior scholar because they are an expert in Iranian history because of whatever it may be they're just going to know certain things about the faith and when they don't it's a really good opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that you know with a humble attitude of course we can always be helping people to understand more about the faith and so for example I've seen you know scholars really senior scholars of Islam say things like the behai faith is a sect of Islam which it's so emphatically is not it's a separate world religion and so just to be able to help them learn about some of these things and often they're happy to learn these things and to you know to modify their understanding but they don't necessarily know those things and we should remember that that you know that we have to be educated and be willing to help others understand better but then yeah also I think being a behai in that space really requires us to hold ourselves to a higher level of etiquette in consultation and in interaction with other scholars then most of the scholarly world would hold us to so when it comes to how we consult in broad spaces how we how we engage in critical work we just need to do it in a way that doesn't breed conflict and contention and conflict and contention is just sort of a part of the package of critical work which is considered a necessary part of academia so that's something that I've I've been reflecting on a lot recently I think is beneficial you know it sounds kind of funny to to say this but you know once you go through graduate school on a phd program and you start to see the way a lot of decisions by graduate students are made and a lot of the expectations of graduate students you know might be slightly simplistic but often what happens as a graduate student finds the most impressive sounding scholar they can find or their advisor somebody's willing to give them money and then takes on their research project and methodology and then sort of applies it to a slightly different phenomenon and so oftentimes the expectation is that you would be the sort of the apprentice to somebody that they have a certain way of doing things and that you would take on more or less you might make some changes after really sort of arguing about it but more or less you would take on their approach to the subject matter now sometimes that can be helpful those approaches will be quite good but other times and particularly when you're dealing with questions about religion more often than not that approach is quite problematic so if one is going to study and talk and think about religion one's faced with this difficulty of what approach do you use what methodology when all these methods and approaches are so immersed within these problematic ideas about religion problematic ideas about the relationship between faith and reason about the place of religion and society in the modern world and I think you know that's been a huge challenge in my own approach to it and it's required a lot of resistance to some of the expectations and the way people have tried to sort of channel my own research or sort of demand that I talk about a certain subject matter but then again one also has to face the opposite temptation which is to kind of just get into the kind of so high specific model that you're saying things that aren't really relevant to the wider society and don't really meet the requirements of excellence that are at play and rightfully so within the academic community so how is it that one can not just kind of take on wholesale the things that everyone else are doing but at the same time not just kind of be so in a sense self-righteous that we just assert our own viewpoint without real really robust and critical and rigorous argumentation and empirical analysis so to sort of strike that balance and even to know what that would look like is a very challenging thing to do and that's been one of the real challenges that I've been thinking about the whole time through my graduate program and now into my career as a researcher and I think just to give you a sense of within philosophy in particular what are the kind of debates that are happening and why might it be difficult to think about what to do so on the one hand you find what might be described more appropriately as philosophical theology which people are on the one hand arguing about God can we prove God exists if so what's the most rational conception of God but what often tends to happen is it's just a sort of a closeted way through very kind of rigorous logical argumentation of trying to justify a sort of traditional Christian orthodox conception of God and so it's this sort of closet project of Christian philosophical theology and the debates on science and religion that are very metaphysical they're all swirling around this underlying assumption so do you leap into those if you do why what would be the point I mean it doesn't seem to me that like we spend so much time trying to argue about God and the nature of God in fact we've said we can't really understand the nature of God better not to worry about that and to focus on the exigencies of the the age in which we live it's okay so we want to move away from this and there are other approaches as well where people are now talking about the changing place of religion and the modern world a lot of philosophers in a very profound sense are doing that but their arguments are framed within a Christo and Western centric perspective they're saying well something about the nature of Christianity which was the culmination of all prior religious developments created this new configuration in which we had the separation between a transcendent realm and kind of a holy separate world below you get this kind of slawing off of transcendence and we're left with this secular world and then people are debating well is this legitimate is it not legitimate should we change it in certain ways and you know these are very prominent intellectuals philosophers who are involved in this debate now we don't think that Christianity is the axis of human history nor do we think that Western Europe is the subsequent kind of turning point of modernity so you have to go back and question the assumptions of that but then they're not necessarily willing to go along with you so how do you do that how do you engage in that debate now one possibility is to throw up your hands and do something else but if you know like me you're sort of unable to do that you then have to really think well how do I approach it what do I do and I'm not I by no means claim to have figured it out but these are the kind of perplexities that have just sort of burdened me but also at the same time shaped the kind of the course of my research throughout you know throughout my graduate degree just on a very practical note I think the question had to do with as a Baha'i in that setting what I'm aware of is that there's so little out there in popular widely read scholarship about the Baha'i faith and what is there is often inaccurate and sometimes embarrassingly so from some of the leading figures from whom you would expect better or at least to spell the Baha'i faith correctly if you want to set a lower bar but so I feel a certain responsibility that if I'm going to try to articulate a high perspective on something or to say anything where I'm trying to put that forward is I feel that undue sense of weight because I don't have the comfort of knowing oh there are probably 20, 30, 40, 50 others who are going to put their perspective forward and somehow the aggregate of that will be a contribution of Baha'i thinking on this subject so that is to say that this is just the time which we're at in the development of of Baha'i scholarship and what is being published what publishers want to put out there and also the fact that that they are putting out their publishing material which is not correct or of the standard that we would like to see in terms of the accuracy in writing about the Baha'i faith so it's just a thing that I continue to be to be aware of and it's probably healthy to be aware of it maybe we can know with the scope outward again and sort of maybe look at the question of whether there are any prevalent approaches in the field of religion and society that you've encountered that you think are quite problematic from a Baha'i perspective or unhelpful to your the thesis that you're pursuing in your research where you've said is there any remover of difficulties Could I start by first saying something that I think is positive in the academy? I think there are a lot of problems and as we point them out there are so many problematic frameworks and problematic ideas but it's also really good to remember that for all of these sort of stale old conceptual frameworks or you know for all of these you know the lack of collaborative endeavor there are also so many people in the academy who want those things and don't necessarily know where to look to find them or you'll even find at the broader level of discourse in religious studies in Islam there are so many people saying you know we don't have a good enough understanding of what religion is we need a new way of understanding what Islam is as a religion you know this sort of post-modern slump that a lot of you know religious studies or Islamic studies you know scholars feel that we're in people are looking for something new and really trying hard to push toward that so there are so many you know people with whom we can collaborate that there's no reason for us to expect that you know we as Baha'is alone are gonna figure this out but that with you know cooperation and collaboration with these other people of whom there are many I think that's the the way that we'll be able to move past some of these unfortunate and problematic ideas I think we have we have some time we can have some questions from the audience that might be good okay we have but you're gonna have to stand up and I don't think we're ready for might you're just gonna have to stand up and speak real loud maybe if you came up yeah did you hear him she's gonna do it she had asked I had spoken to this concept of multiple modernities does the Baha'i faith have room for this concept of this framework and if so how so you know on the first first level I think it's a it's an academic theory and it's helpful it gives us insight into certain dynamics that we want to talk about so whether we can say the Baha'i faith has a believes in multiple modernities well I don't know but this framework I find helpful it gives me insight to certain things that I do see being described in the writings and in the guidance and so I think for example we know that the world order of Baha'i will not be built by any one civilization it's not somehow going to be this western model that we just kind of universalized we give it a little bit of a spiritual core and that's the world order of Baha'u'llah not at all we know that every culture and people has certain distinctive contributions to make to this emergent world order now we don't know exactly what those contributions will be and we also know that like we can't just say beforehand this aspect of of Chinese culture or this aspect of Latin American culture or this back aspect of Indian culture but somehow as we all strive to build the world order elements of our cultures that are good and pure they make their way into that world order while other aspects of it that are a bit problematic are left behind so as I think about this framework of multiple modernities it allows me to think well okay we see these distinct configurations of modern societies they have distinct qualities and characteristics some of those are highly problematic but some of those are also quite productive and then as we can think about some emergent global society gradually taking shape through the interactions and contributions of all these these diverse configurations that to me begins to help me think a bit more clearly about the processes that I find to be described in the writings about the emergent world order of Baha'u'llah Yes Jeff briefly it's also very good to remember that the revelation of Baha'u'llah has impacted all reality so all of the social movements the burgeoning ideas the transformative notions that are now at play and so many parts of the world are a response to the revelation and so we need to be able to read those movements and those processes and understand and correlate to our teachings Okay so we have some of the microphone so next Could any one of you provide maybe one or two historical examples of religion serving as a system of knowledge? So I can speak to the example of Islam a little bit I think one thing that we see in throughout Islamic history is that after the emergence of the Islamic dispensation we have this huge maybe renaissance is the wrong word but we have this huge upsurge in scientific and academic progress so it all started with this basic system of knowledge by which children would learn the Quran you go to school you have the fundamental component of your education is memorizing Quran and that ends up branching off into different systems by which you know once you've learned Quran then you may learn something about traditions of the prophet you may learn something about interpretations of the Quran you may learn something about you know about Islamic law but as you're branching out then there are all these other requirements so if you want to really practice Islamic law there are certain things that require you to get really good at math and astronomy to be able to calculate lunar positions to be able to calculate prayer times things like that so this whole system of knowledge developed but rooted deeply in the revelation and I think that that example is such a clear one of how a dispensation the actual revelation from the manifestation becomes the origin of an entire system of knowledge one other brief example or brief sort of description is that you know there's been some really interesting research about these even these older religious forms that go back before you know Buddhism and Judaism and Zoroastrianism and these these religions before the religions with sacred texts and one of the things that people have been describing is the way that ritual in an early tribal setting it's actually the only way to store knowledge if you can't write and you don't have these external systems for storage of information you have to perpetually repeat these forms that can pass on knowledge from generation to generation and so we know that in the earliest forms of religion ritual becomes really one of the organizing features so in that regard it's not to say it's a perfect system of knowledge but that's the framework people are using now to talk about the role of ritual and in human history and then at the next stage you begin to find these encompassing mythological frameworks and again they allow for knowledge about the world to be preserved to be disseminated to be passed on from generation to generation before you had these systems of storing knowledge more precisely more conceptually in texts and these kind of things so you know in the same way that we might look back at certain sort of early forms of science and we know that they wouldn't meet the requirements of knowledge that we have today nevertheless I think also with religion we look back and okay that's not the kind of knowledge exactly we're trying to generate today but even from the various early beginnings we now know that religion and knowledge religion operates as a system of knowledge in a certain way and allow that knowledge to emerge and to impact the evolution of human civilization and this is all now increasingly well documented maybe someone over on the side this question is directed to Julia the experience I had working at the BIC Geneva between 1988 until 1993 the specific experience was working with the preparatory committee meetings before the Earth Summit three years and the direction from House of Justice was that BIC representative should be a source of unity so with that ingrained in my mind so you're right that NGOs and colleagues that you know behind us are kind of a you know background and your statement is very lovely but not controversial enough but it's interestingly in a positive way is that or when you choose an NGO spokesperson you do it because when you speak have a magic you are able to bring people together so secretary general himself said well that explains you have a high so we are known not controversial but actually very positive source of unity so in the statement of a preamble of earth chatter we worked together for three years with the NGOs and then that statement in order to get the oneness of humanity concept so we were able to have a consensus saying we belong to one human family sharing one common homeland or that's we're basically oneness of humanity and you know so on so we couldn't use direct language but that got in and then working with the two governments and they put forward in the flow and that got into the earth chatter so that's one of a specific example how VIC is able to work in the background by riches of consensus those statements so since I haven't been out of BIS for a long time I wanted to ask you Julia can you share with us one of other examples I'm sure there are many especially in human rights but other than human rights we you passed the resolution so on we know that any other area of our social intercourse that you can give specific examples you were able to the statements and able to accomplish that oneness of humanity and other concepts thank you that's that's a really interesting question and and there are so so many examples from different fields but maybe just two from recent history so three years ago so you may know that the UN for the past three years has been working on what it considers to be the most ambitious and transformative development agenda for the entire world so you may be familiar with the term millennium development goals that the UN had set eight goals that all of the countries of the world would commit to between the year 2000 and 2015 in order to push development forward so eradication of poverty elimination of maternal of maternal mortality more children in school along these lines and so having reflected on some of the shortcomings of those goals they now launched a much more ambitious agenda from 2015 to 2030 which now one of their goals was to involve many more people around the world and the formulation of these goals because they realized that when they were putting together the millennium development goals much of the resentment was that well this these were developed by like eight men behind closed doors and why should we support them so the UN to its credit really exerted an unprecedented effort to bring others into the conversation but so what so the BIC was thinking about well how can we contribute to this effort there's there's a lot of good will here tremendous energy lots of learning being identified from the past 15 years and and so rather than well alongside giving maybe specific contributions conceptually we decided that we would create a space that did not exist at the UN which is a space where representatives of missions so member states representatives of UN agency and civil society could come together on a regular basis and without having to state their positions on issues they could just discuss some of these cross-cutting issues that were challenges in the process of developing this agenda and so now we've had I think 30 or 40 of these we call them informal breakfast meetings and the feedback we've gotten is that this is a really different space this space engenders a different kind of conversation we also you know don't publicize notes from these meetings everybody feel we hope that they feel more comfortable to speak and what we noticed was so interesting is that you know UN agencies would be giving their input and they would look at each other across the table and say I didn't know you were working on that issue as well you know so you realize that that that sometimes those mechanisms that you take for granted should be there are not there and I think that was one example of trying to create a space for a conversation and I think it's been greatly appreciated by the UN by the UN community another example you have to stop sorry that's it so thank you everyone and of course this is an ocean and we've taken a few sips I want to say one thing you can see that these young folks here are really representing the face so well and it shows that yes we have rigor we have concepts we have methodologies we have theories but we also have spiritual perception and intuition and faith and when those two come together it makes a big difference thank you so much