Roshan Danesh has devoted his career to the study of law and religion with a particular focus on the Bahá’í Faith and its central legal text, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. In this collection of essays—previously published in a variety of academic journals, including the prestigious Journal of Law and Religion—Danesh invites the reader into an exploration of largely unchartered waters. As he states in the introduction to this collection, “understanding Bahá’í law challenges us to question, and ultimately abandon, our taken-for-granted ways of thinking, talking about, and using law.”

Organized around four distinct areas— Bahá'u'lláh's conception of law, the constitutional dimensions of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh's theory of social change, and scholarship and discourses concerning Bahá'í law—the essays collected here are expansive and illuminating, and they provide an invaluable contribution to discourse on the subject, with a foreword by Kiser Barnes.

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Rarely does a book cover a historically and culturally important topic that has never been written about before. Yet Lights of the Spirit: Historical Portraits of Black Bahá'ís in North America, 1898-2000 accomplishes precisely this through an absorbing collection of glimpses into the lives of some extraordinary individuals who devoted themselves to a common cause and made outstanding contributions toward building a unified society.

Edited by Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, a professor of English at Miami University in Ohio, and Richard Thomas, a professor of history at Michigan State University, the book brings to light the stories of a diverse group of people including attorney Louis Gregory, poet Robert Hayden, jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, Broadway actress Dorothy Champ, and Canadian singer Eddie Elliot, to name a few.

Lights of the Spirit is divided into two sections. Part one offers a helpful introduction to the Bahá'í Faith and six highly readable essays that comprehensively describe the black experience in the North American Baha'i community. Chapters by Etter-Lewis, Thomas, and others address African-Americans and the development of the Faith in the U.S. and Canada, contributions of African-American women, and the role African-Americans in the global expansion of the Baha'i Faith.

Part two contains documents from nine historically prominent African-American Bahá'ís, providing insights into how these remarkable individuals perceived themselves and the larger communities in which they lived. Here, readers will find creative and social commentaries, letters, and family histories. Many of the documents are previously unpublished. Written from a first-person point of view, they preserve a largely unknown history that expands our notions of African-American religious traditions.

The unique content of the book will appeal to readers interested in Black history, race relations, and the history of religion in North America.

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The Bahá’í International Community (BIC) has published a book compiling three decades of its statements to the UN on gender equality. In Full Partnership is part of global “Beijing+30” initiatives reflecting on commitments, challenges, and progress around advancing gender equality over three decades. In Full Partnership is intended as a resource as well as an invitation for collective action and consultation on practical steps that could lead to lasting gender equality and justice.

The release of In Full Partnership aligns with the international community’s assessment of the persistent challenges and setbacks faced by the gender equality movement—including rising political polarization and entrenched patriarchal attitudes. At the same time, the publication underscores significant achievements, offering hopeful and practical examples from Bahá’í communities in over 100,000 localities worldwide, working alongside friends, co-workers, government officials, and like-minded organizations to promote societies that embody the principle of gender equality.

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