Shoghi Effendi and Mark Foster are speaking about different things and so their statements are not contradictory. According to my dictionary (an old pocket Oxford), "eclectic" means "borrowing freely from various sources, not exclusive in opinion, taste, etc."
The Guardian is referring to the Baha'i Faith in the sense of the divine Laws and Teachings, which Baha'u'llah did not collect from various sources, but received as a perfect whole in the form of revelation. If the Faith, in this sense, was eclectic, it could not be from God, which is presumably why Shoghi Effendi categorically stated that it was not. If we try to "borrow" from other sources to add to it, we are adding man-made accreditions to the divine foundation. Mark referred to "the Baha'i Faith, the organisation". As a sociologist he presumably had in mind the totality of the "Baha'i experience", so to speak: Baha'i community life and social norms, Baha'i intellectual life and philosophy, Baha'i art, and so on - IOW, the human aspect of the religion as opposed to the divine. In this sense, the Baha'i Faith indeed is - and should be - eclectic, as long as we do not claim that our "borrowings" have the same immutable and authoritative status as the divine core of the Faith. A simple example: I attended a Baha'i wedding (between two young Persians) where the ceremony included a gesture adopted from the Navajo tradition. It was wonderful! Eclectic is essentially a synonym for unity in diversity. ---------- You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Baha'i Studies is available through the following: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://list.jccc.net/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=bahai-st news://list.jccc.net/bahai-st http://www.escribe.com/religion/bahaist (public) http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] (public)
