January 2022 – folded within

Martin Luther King day is a good time to link to a 2-part article on The Bahá’í World site with a historical perspective on racism in the United States:

The Bahá’í response to racial injustice and pursuit of racial unity

Part 1: 1912-1996

Part 2: 1996-2021

This site is the online continuation of a series of “yearbook-like” compilations of Bahá’í history, published from 1926 on. I like the longer-form perspective articles it has. Two others I liked are:

A new cycle of human power: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s encounters with modernist writers and artists

Reading reality in times of crisis: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Great War

On a tangent, I’m making a list of recent new Bahá’í terminology with a goal of taking notes on their meanings. Often new developments need naming to be understood, and I hope this is what’s happening:

building capacity
elevated conversations
involvement in the discourses of society
reading the reality of […]

There is so much disunity in the world now, but I’ve been captivated by the (so far) successful unboxing and deployment of the Webb telescope–a large group of people worked together across the world to create and launch this thing, despite delays and risks. One example, from this ArsTechnica article:

The Ariane 5 program also selected the best components for Webb based upon pre-flight testing. For example, for the Webb-designated rocket, the program used a main engine that had been especially precise during testing. “It was one of the best Vulcain engines that we’ve ever built,” Albat said. “It has very precise performance. It would have been criminal not to do it.”

The same unified focus was evident in the Apollo launch era.

And then there’s the intrinsic big-picture nature of astronomy. The Hubble captured some inspiring images, and this infrared telescope is an attempt to probe further back in time via red-shifted light. We see the patterns of birth, life, decay and death in our familiar seasons and lifecycles, with matter disintegrated and reconstituted into new life. Now we are trying to look at the lifecycle of this universe.

One of the most popular images from the Hubble was the Eagle Nebula, a section called “the pillars of creation” because it was a star nursery which happened to look like pillars from our vantage point on earth. Here’s the original image, and here’s one that penetrates through the gas shrouding the area.

If this blog had a nice visual theme, one of those pictures was going to be my choice for a splash page or background image.