The Corinne True Center for Bahá’í History was inaugurated by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States in January 2024 to foster education and scholarly study on Bahá’í history, authoritative texts, theology, philosophy, and the Bahá’í approach to other religions and scriptures. Over the past year, it has accomplished the following:
- Basic Setup. The Corinne True Center acquired the basic online infrastructure it needed to operate: a web domain, a website with WordPress and Moodle (for online course delivery), Streamyard (for webinars), Zoom (for course video sessions), YouTube, SoundCloud, Canva (for creating graphics), a Facebook page, access to the National Spiritual Assembly’s Constant Contact system and to Cvent, and a Google office suite with email and cloud storage for files. All of these were acquired by the end of March and set up.
- Executive Committee. This was appointed by the National Spiritual Assembly in January 2024 and it got to work right away. Over the ensuing twelve months it has met once every 5 weeks, 11 times altogether. Its members are William Collins, Gwen Etter-Lewis, Omid Ghaemmaghami, Nima Rafiei, Robert Stockman, and Mina Yazdani.
- Online courses. In 2024 the Corinne True Center ran the following courses:
The Bahá’í Faith: A Comprehensive Introduction, 6 students
Introduction to Bahá’í History, 14 students
Jesus and the Gospels in Bahá’í and Historic Perspective, 40 students
Introduction to Arabic, 24 students
Elementary Arabic II, 10 students
Introduction to Persian, 23 students
Six courses; 113 students altogether; tuition income equaled expenses running the courses.
The language courses were a historic development and had some very dedicated and hard-working students. Jesus and the Gospels was also historic; it was an attempt to bring together the spiritual insights in the Bahá’í texts into the mission of Jesus with the consensus of academic New Testament scholarship. Many students commented about how transformative the course was to them (see).
In 2025, 13 courses currently are scheduled, including one language course. Most likely there will be two or three more language classes, raising the 2025 total to about 15.
- Webinars. Our first webinar was run on February 18, just weeks after the Center’s establishment, and we continued with an average of two webinars per month throughout the year. Altogether, we conducted 20 webinars (they are listed here). Our YouTube channel now has 865 subscribers and a total of over 13,000 views. Violetta Zeine’s webinar about Shoghi Effendi’s travels in Africa has had the most views: 2,100. In addition to regular webinars with one speaker, the Corinne True Center is planning video panels in 2025. In March it will sponsor two panels of three speakers each describing their papers published in a special issue of Hawwa: The Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World about Tahirih.
- In-Person Events. The Corinne True Center sponsored a panel about Bahá’í history and theology at the Association for Bahá’í Studies conference in Atlanta in August. In 2025 the Center plans to hold a conference for “entry level” scholarship on the Faith in June and will propose panels on Bahá’í history and theology to the ABS conference in Calgary.
- Publications. Starting in August, the Corinne True Center began to edit and publish on its website short (less than 10 pages) entry-level “Research Notes” on Bahá’í history. Most focus on the biography of an individual or the development of a local community. In 2025 we will continue the effort and start publishing selected papers written by students in our online courses.
The Corinne True Center publishes an electronic newsletter on the first of each month, which reaches over 30,000 people. It also updates its web page and Facebook page two or three times per month.
- Book Club. Of particular importance has been the success of our Book Club. We wanted a way to engage with people other than courses and video lectures/discussions and do something at a more introductory level. The Book Club reads a different book every month; we encourage everyone to form a local group to read the book together. Then at the end of the month, the Corinne True Center offers a video webinar with the book’s author or someone else who can speak about the book effectively. The club has steadily grown and its membership is now approaching 200. It has discussed three books and plans to study twelve in 2025. The live web video sessions have been popular, reaching as many as 100 people, and the recordings have continued to accumulate views.
- Oral History, Local History, and Family History. In October the Corinne True Center appointed a team to examine ways we can encourage more oral, local, and family history. The team is developing an oral history workshop to train Bahá’ís how to collect oral history. The recordings will be stored by the U.S. Bahá’í Archives. Some members of the team will also serve as faculty for Writing Biographies and Histories, an online course the Center has inherited from the Wilmette Institute.