I would like to offer you some links to documents which I think are really worth studying:

Promise of World Peace

Century of Light

Rights and Freedoms

One Common Faith

I am constantly amazed at the depth of these documents, which offer unique perspectives, broad historical scope, excellent scholarship, spiritual sustenance, critical analysis, and beyond these....hope.

My dad told me that when he first read The Promise of World Peace, he was walking uphill from the post office in San Ignacio, Belize. It was a hot, hot day (most of them are, there) and as he climbed, he read. And he wept. I hope he doesn't mind my saying this (it's funny, I don't remember Dad crying at all when I was young, but he is often moved to tears in his old age...I hope I will be too). I like it that my father is a man who is able to be moved to weep at the vision of a document outlining the inevitability of world peace. So many people who are unfamiliar with the Baha'i faith see such hope as utopian or facile; I understand this. It is very challenging to be hopeful in a world which appears to be so grievously undermined by the human propensity for shooting ourselves in the foot (and so many other parts of our anatomy). Yet spiritual progress requires analysis, vision, and scholarship...thus I recommend these documents to your study. I am only beginning, myself, to get a glimmer of what they are talking about, but sometimes I try and imagine what it would be like to not have them available to me, for figuring things out, for understanding the progressive and developmental nature of the human condition, for holding in heart and mind the ideals of an "ever-advancing civilization", and I am glad that I have something so intelligent and reasoned, so real and passionate, at once, to turn to.

Take a look.