David Langness

David Langness (b. February 13, 1950) is the managing editor of BahaiTeachings.org, the global Baha'i website dedicated to teaching the Faith to seekers. Langness, a longtime journalist and health care advocate for the poor, co-founded Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles in 1985, and served on its board of directors for a quarter century. During the course of his professional career, he worked primarily for non-profit health care organizations, including the Hospital Council of Southern California, UCLA and Kaiser Permanente, advocating for American health care reform (see The System, by Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder)and finally witnessing and assisting in its implementation.

Langness also works professionally as a journalist, currently for Paste Magazine, the popular culture and independent arts journal, where he reports on literature and music.

He became a Baha'i in Arizona in 1968, and then set out on a year-long travel teaching trip, hitchhiking across the United States and giving Baha'i talks and presentations in forty states. At the end of that year, he was drafted into the United States Army, where he served for 14 months in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam as a conscientious objector medic. Langness chronicled his Vietnam experiences in the Kalimat Press book Circle of Peace, where his essay titled "A Baha'i Goes to War" recounts the journey of a peaceful Baha'i in combat.

Langness has served the Faith as a delegate to the National Baha'i Convention many times; as a member and the chairman of the Los Angeles Local Spiritual Assembly for several years; as a member of various national and regional committees; as an assistant to the Auxiliary Board; and as a homefront pioneer in various locations throughout the western part of the United States.

In 2013, Payam Zamani, the founder of BahaiTeachings.org, asked Langness to help build a new independent website dedicated to teaching the Faith. Within its first two and a half years, BahaiTeachings grew rapidly, generating a global audience of more than a quarter million seekers, and becoming the largest and most popular Baha'i site on the web. Langness writes and edits for BahaiTeachings, and as an essayist has contributed more than a thousand articles to the site to date. He is also currently at work on an introductory Baha'i book titled The Seeker's Path, based on Baha'u'llah's The Four Valleys.