Description

REFLECTIONS ON A CULTURE OF LEARNING AND GROWTH:Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts:
A Context and a Personal Text
by Ron Price


REFLECTIONS ON A CULTURE OF LEARNING AND GROWTH: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts--A Context and a Personal Text. Reflections and understandings regarding the culture of learning and growth as well as the accompanying paradigm shift in the Fourth and Fifth Epochs of the Formative Age: 1986 to 2021 during the Second Epoch(1963-2021) of 'Abdul-Baha's Divine Plan.

This essay contains reflections and understandings regarding the culture of learning and of growth as well as the paradigmatic shift that the Baha’i community is currently going through and has been going through since the mid-1990s in relation to learning and growth. Comparisons and contrasts are made to previous paradigm shifts in the Bahai community. Hopefully this essay will contribute to an inevitable and necessary dialogue on the issues regarding the many related processes involved in this ongoing paradigmatic shift and provide, at the same time a relevant context in which some of the fundamental issues within this paradigm can be discussed. This essay is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary in April 2008 of its first election in April 1963. This essay is also written in memory of my maternal grandfather whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been since my youth a model of an engagement in quite a different culture of learning.

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DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary in April 2008 of its first election in April 1963, the year that, arguably, was the beginning of the last paradigmatic shift in Bahai community life. This essay is also written in commemoration of the memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield, whose epic autobiography and whose life was an example to me of the quite different culture of learning with which he was imbued all his life.
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PREAMBLE:

This essay was originally written for the Online Journal of Baha’i Studies, a journal which appeared to be ahead of its time, was not sustainable for various reasons and which was closed at its website in early 2009. I hope that this essay will serve readers as a useful extension of their own reflections and understandings regarding this culture of learning and of growth and the paradigmatic shift the Baha’i community is currently going through and has been going through since the mid-1990s in relation to both learning and growth. The impulse to ponder and to try to distil the events in the Bahai community in those fin de siecle years and these early ones in this new millennium has led to this essay. You have, it goes without saying dear reader, the freedom to disagree as you travel on this brief journey of some 83,000 words in this small 180 page book. In its totality, this book gives glimpses of a complex whole that is the Bahá’í community and especially a new paradigm at the centre of this community.

This Faith attaches a great deal of importance to freedom and initiative and to the interpretation of its texts, its programs and its community life. If I can make but a small contribution, while exercising this freedom and initiative, in assisting the bringing about personal, individual, paradigm shifts in the lives of some of my fellow believers across the globe, paradigm shifts as important as the one in the wider Bahai community, this essay will have achieved one of its central purposes. I have found, in writing down my thoughts on this subject, that I have created for myself a taking-off point and hopefully a taking-off point for readers, one that draws on many serious and complex ideas. I have experienced, as I have tried to get beyond the new language of this paradigmatic shift, an auspicious b