“I Am the Mystic Fane”: The Nature of the Manifestation in the Bahá’í Writings—A Web Talk on May 8 by Dr. Steven Phelps
Apr 1, 2016
The next Web Talk in the Wilmette Institute’s series will take place on Sunday, May 8, starting, as usual, at 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (11 a.m. Pacific and 8 p.m. Western Europe Time). The topic is “‘I Am the Mystic Fane’: The Nature of the Manifestation in the Bahá’í Writings.” The speaker is Dr. Steven Phelps. Dr. Phelps describes his talk by asking a number of questions:
“How can we understand the reality of the Prophet in an age of science?
“What is special about their persons?
“What is special about their words? Is revelation a ‘top-down’ or a ‘bottom-up’ phenomenon?”
He promises to answer these questions and others in light of the revelation of the Báb. Dr. Phelps received his Bachelor’s degrees in physics and a PhD in physics and philosophy at Stanford University and a PhD in physics from Princeton University. He worked for thirteen years at the Bahá’í World Center in its Research Department, directing the cataloging, collation, and translation of the Bahá’í writings. During that time he concurrently held positions in the Physics Department at the Technion University in Haifa and pursued original research in the field of theoretical cosmology. He now lives near Portland, Oregon, with his wife Katharine and three daughters.