Study the Faith is a great new site which helps you do exactly just that: “Study the Faith”.

When it comes to studying the Baha’i Writings, this wonderful new online initiative takes you through the process of familiarising and deepening your understanding of certain topics or texts within the Baha’i Faith by helping you decide what to study, how to study, and where to find more information.

The site was started by Maryam, Naeem and Neysan – three of my friends based in Germany, so I decided to get in touch with them to find out more about it.

Baha’i Blog: Can you tell us what Study the Faith actually is?

Well, we all know it can be overwhelming to face volumes of Baha’i books and not know where to start. And once we’ve picked one up to study, how can we make our study sessions more effective? We started exploring these challenges and created Study the Faith, a website that we hope will become a space to continue the quest for better studying.

Baha’i Blog: Who’s involved with the ‘Study the Faith’ initiative?

We’re a small enthusiastic team and have had invaluable input from friends and family. The idea came up as the three of us were talking about how we could improve our study habits and then grew from there.

Baha’i Blog: What are your hopes for the initiative, and how do you hope it can help individuals and communities?

Becoming familiar with the Writings allows us to relate Bahá’í beliefs to the current thoughts and challenges of the world and strengthens our personal relationship to the Faith. It’s an enormous task and core to building a new civilization. Our hope is for “Study the Faith” to help make this seemingly insurmountable task just a little easier.

Baha’i Blog: Will you be offering it in different languages as well?

We’re starting the website off very simple and want to learn. We feel that sticking to a single language in the early stages would allow us to change and advance more dynamically. But who knows what might happen a little down the road.

Baha’i Blog: What are some of the main challenges you’ve faced in trying to get this initiative off the ground?

Suggesting a set of steps without providing a recipe for studying the Writings was not easy. For instance, our library – a summary of literature plus helpful resources – is short, but we tried not to put any emphasis on any specific one. The selection covers different themes and none essentially take priority over the other. Obviously there is no single way to study the Writings, and we had to make space for a wide spectrum of approaches.

Baha’i Blog: How do you hope to see the initiative evolve over the next 5 years or so?

We want to learn more about studying as we go along. There’s no specific roadmap for the initiative. Instead, we hope that each person’s study efforts will provide more insight. The studying itself will take place mostly offline, so we’ll see what role an online space can play. A year from now we may find that a website isn’t a good solution after all or that it has grown useful through the experiences of eager people. We’ll see 🙂

Baha’i Blog: Thanks Maryam, Naeem and Neysan for taking the time to do this interview, and thanks so much for providing us all with this wonderful site. I hope everyone takes full advantage of this wonderful online resource!

Find out more about ‘Study the Faith’ and get started here.