Hank Owings

Currently finishing up (for fun):

No better diagnostic of the media environment right now that the non-story of a Trumper deciding to kill heretics & burn their church

New website alerts Orthodox Church to 'clergy sex abuse problem it must reckon with' (RNS) — Prosopon Healing not only names names, but offers victims help in coming to terms with their trauma.

Two Orthodox Christian women have created a new website about sexual misconduct and abuse in their denomination that not only names names, but offers victims help in coming to terms with their trauma.
religionnews.com/2025/09/25/n...

Suspended on a Cross: Race, Acts 5:30, and Justice On September 18, locals discovered Trey Reed, a Delta State University student, hanging from a tree.[i] His body was found only thirty miles from where Mississippians lynched Emmett Till in 1955.

open.substack.com/pub/hankowin...

The United States of Division; On Learning to Love Your Enemies “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:43)

Hello all, I wrote something as a political theorist and as a Bahá’í about Kirk’s death. Hoping to get back into long-form, public-facing writing (as I used to do long before my PhD program).

Hey so with free speech front and center this week and last, I’d definitely recommend my own argument to frame it — and the many others I’ve built upon in my bibliography

bahaiquotes.com/subject/guns

Why Religious Studies Is in Trouble As colleges plan to make cuts, departments in this field are finding themselves on the chopping block.

I tell my students that if people in power are that determined to get them to stop studying a subject, it's probably a good sign of why that subject is so important: www.chronicle.com/article/why-...

Waged by* the Israeli government. Word limit made me choose a conceptually unclear preposition.

I’m a Baha’i, and let me say this clearly: My religion is not your cudgel to use to slander a family taking a moral & just stance against genocide.

Moreover, the legal oppression of Baha’is in Qatar is not comparable to the apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of the Israeli government.

Refusing to Listen: Receptive Audiences and the Political Authority of Speech in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill Click on the article title to read more.

Happy to share my first article with the world, a critique of the liberal notion of “free speech” — and why certain kinds of speech are less valued than others:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Philadelphia in the summer

Creativity, humor, joy all over the projects, despite the somber content

Can I just say I love what my students ended up submitting for their final projects in American Political Thought. I assigned an open-ended “creative audio-visual” project contextualizing one contemporary issue with course readings (1700-1930s texts/debates). They did not disappoint!

All words that speak to me as an academic as I teach the entrenched inequalities of race - and sex and nation and class.

I was delighted at our National Spiritual Assembly's insistence on meeting this moment with critical honesty.

We cannot suppress or ignore our history or the reality of injustice. We need to confront the moment with "honesty" and "truthful discourse." We need to listen and "truly heart" from "those who have directly suffered."

It is critical to understand our present reality and how we got here so that we can move forward and this capacity should manifest itself in our schools, the media, and other civic arenas as well as in our work and personal relations."

…An essential element of the process will be honest and truthful discourse about the road we have taken to where we are now. We must, for example, build the capacity to truly hear and acknowledge the voices of those who have directly suffered from the effects of racial prejudice.

It implies social innovations more profound than anything we have yet achieved and it requires the participation of Americans of every race, creed, and background. For only through such inclusive participation can we achieve unity.

This awareness creates the moral imperative to act and to view all aspects of our personal social and institutional lives through the lens of justice.

"it is time to remember who we Americans aspire to be as a people. This moment beckons us to a renewed commitment to realize the ideal of e pluribus unum; out of many; one; the very aspiration upon which America was founded. It is not enough simply to believe in our hearts that we are all equal.

In a growing moment of hostility toward all things racially inclusive - #DEI, critical race theory, "diversity," and many more other metonymies for racial inclusion - a few points from his speech yesterday stood out.

As a boy in the segregated south, his family hosted #Baha’i devotionals w/ Black friends and neighbors. He's recounted in an interview of one evening where his family & friends had to turn the lights off & rest on the floor when white locals, upset at this interracial gathering, threatened violence

Kenneth Bowers, a long-serving member of the Assembly, knows personally the effects of social injustice.

Here’s our current NSA, elected yesterday. Bowers if fourth on the left.

Yesterday, members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the #Baha'is of the United States - our democratically elected national leadership - gave an hour-long talk about the present moment many of us confront as Americas.

Also recommend; these are the kind of principles we should be advocating for on our campuses!

Also worth reading for the commentary on free speech politics! (Which is actually why I’m looking through it)

Reading for a project I’m working on and the chapter on American fascism begins with the second KKK. I just taught Hiram Evans to undergraduates last week and was wondering why it’s not more common to identify fascism earlier than just before WWII!

Happy Ridván, the holiest holiday period of the Bahá’í Faith, when Bahá’u’lláh declared himself a Manifestation of God in Baghdad.

Here’s some of the wisdom of our international leaders on economic and racial justice.

My feelings about generative AI:

1) I'm highly skeptical it'll ever work

2) It's distracting from actual use cases for AI

3) We need a pause until it can be done without wrecking the environment or stealing IP

4) If it does have real potential then it shouldn't be controlled by ruthless people