Fireside Library

Baha'i written materials to have firesides and the website that publishes them.

Goals

Fireside Library is a collection of standalone written firesides for small groups of Baha'is and seekers exploring the Faith together. Each fireside is written for newcomers are a high-school reading level.

The project aims to:

• Make it easier to directly teach the Baha'i Faith. Conversations are at the heart of growing the Baha'i community. These are tools to have direct convesations about topics of meaning.

• Build a vetted, repeatable library. Every written text can be used from group to group and reduces the barrier to sitting with somebody to speak directly about the Baha'i Faith.

• Keep authoring and publishing separate but connected. Writers work in plain Markdown; the website renders whatever the writers ship without them needing to touch web code.

The split: content vs. web

This is a monorepo with two areas that are deliberately decoupled.

Area	What it is
content/	The fireside materials themselves
web/	The publishing website (Astro) that turns those drafts into a static site.

How they connect: the site reads the content folder directly at build time (web/src/lib/firesides.ts). For each fireside it picks the latest draft — preferring final.md, then the highest v*.md, then the highest ai-draft-*.md — strips %%…%% editorial comments, reads metadata.yaml, and skips any entry marked hidden: true. Writers never edit web code; publishing a new revision is just committing a new draft file.

fireside-library/
├── content/                 # AUTHORING — writers & editors live here
│   ├── brief/               # Audience, process, style guide, voice, samples
│   ├── analysis/            # Cross-fireside reviews and proposals
│   └── firesides/           # Numbered fireside folders (self-contained)
│       └── 08-prayer/
│           ├── metadata.yaml   # Title, phase, topics, status, hidden flag
│           ├── research/       # Source material (encrypted — see below)
│           ├── drafts/         # ai-draft-*.md, v1.md, v2.md…
│           ├── final.md        # Approved fireside (optional)
│           └── report.html     # Generated grading report
├── web/                     # PUBLISHING — Astro static site
├── CLAUDE.md                # Top-level routing
├── TODO.md                  # Shared tracking across content and web
└── README.md

State of the firesides

13 firesides exist today. Status is tracked in each fireside's metadata.yaml and follows the lifecycle stages above. Firesides 11 and 12 are pasted House letters rather than true firesides; they're marked hidden (excluded from the site) and queued for a full rewrite.

#	Fireside	Phase	Status	Notes
01	Overview of the Baha'i Faith	investigation	beta
02	Baha'i Spiritual Principles	investigation	beta
03	Baha'i Social Teachings	investigation	beta
04	Developing a Relationship with God	investigation	beta
05	The Bab and Baha'u'llah	investigation	beta
06	The Centers of the Covenant	investigation	beta
07	Making Sense of a Turbulent World	investigation	beta
08	Prayer	discovery	beta	Reference benchmark for voice & format
09	The Baha'i Faith and Christianity	investigation	beta
10	The Baha'i Administrative Order	consolidation	beta
11	Suffering and Justice	investigation	research	hidden — needs rewrite from source
12	Non-Involvement in Partisan Politics	investigation	research	hidden — needs rewrite from source
13	Spiritual Development	investigation	beta

Phases mark the seeker the fireside is written for — discovery (first visit), investigation (actively exploring), or consolidation (committed and learning to participate). See content/brief/audience.md for the personas.

Revision priorities and the full implementation plan live in TODO.md.

Where to go next

• Working on fireside content → content/CLAUDE.md
• Working on the website → web/README.md
• Tracking work across both → TODO.md
• Repository structure and routing → CLAUDE.md

Research material (encrypted)

Per-fireside source material under content/firesides/*/research/ (PDFs, transcripts, quote dumps) is third-party copyrighted material and is encrypted with git-crypt. Everything else in the repo is plaintext.

These files are committed as ciphertext and are not readable without the symmetric key. Maintainers with the key decrypt a clone once:

# install git-crypt (macOS)
brew install git-crypt

# unlock a fresh clone (run once per clone/machine)
git-crypt unlock ~/.config/git-crypt/fireside-library.key

After unlocking, encryption and decryption are automatic — files added to any research/ folder are encrypted on commit and readable in the working tree.

The key lives only in the maintainer's password manager and at ~/.config/git-crypt/fireside-library.key. It is never committed. Without it, the research material is unrecoverable — back it up.