Social and World Issues

Readers' Favorite® 5 Star Award Winner

Hazel Scott was a champion for civil and women’s rights. Born in Trinidad in 1920, she moved with her family to the United States in 1924. She was a musical wonder— studying and performing on the piano from the time she was a child. She became an accomplished singer as well, and appeared in Broadway musicals, films, and recorded her own albums. She also made headlines by standing up for the rights of women and African Americans, and she refused to play for segregated audiences. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the March on Washington, Hazel led a march in Paris, where she was living, in front of the American Embassy. She learned about the Bahá’í Faith from Dizzy Gillespie and became a Bahá’í on December 1, 1968. She passed away in 1981.

We invite you to learn more about this “Change Maker” and the enduring impact she had on race relations through her performing arts.

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This book draws on the story of the "watchman" told by Bahá’u’lláh in The Seven Valleys to describe the author’s own life journey, seeking meaning in life and at last finding it in the Bahá’í Faith. In parallel, it also presents the science of neurocardiology and how it has reestablished the importance of the heart for mental, emotional and physical well-being. Dr Klebel writes that the underlying unity of a person encompasses both the heart and the brain. The heart expresses itself through feelings, often today referred as "emotional intelligence." We know about the heart’s decisions and conclusions only when they become conscious in the brain.

On a December day in 1973, Anisa Abdul-Razzaq Abbas heard a knock at the door of the Baghdad home she was visiting. She opened the door to greet two men from the Iraqi Al-Amn security force, who immediately placed her under arrest. Her crime: being a member of the Bahá’í Faith, a religious minority in her native Iraq.

Over the next six years, Anisa—along with other members of the Bahá’í community who were arrested at that time—would spend three years in Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison and a further three years in Al-Rashaad prison before her release in 1979. During her years of incarceration, Anisa would rely on her faith to meet the myriad challenges of prison life. Day after day, she and her fellow-prisoners experienced levels of cruelty and injustice that most would find unthinkable. Separated from her husband, who was being held in the men’s prison, and from her children who were without both parents, Anisa was sustained through her darkest days by the steadfast devotion and sacrificial love of her family, and by the strength and solidarity offered by her fellow Bahá’í prisoners.

Anisa’s story is one of patience, courage, and steadfastness in the face of religious prejudice and state-sponsored oppression, and it is a reminder to us all of the resilient strength of the human spirit.

What lies beyond Covid-19? How does it challenge humanity as a whole and ourselves as individuals to bring about change?

The global pandemic that changed the world in early 2020, and the subsequent challenges that are emerging as a result, propel us to consider what is beyond this moment. The spirit of humanity, challenged daily by increasing trauma, requires constant reflection on who we are and who we collectively want to be. How can we arise to create a global collective consciousness? What is latent within humanity to bring about the transformation required?