[Air-L] Religious Dimension of Sustainable Development

[Charles Ess]

Hi tom,
> 
> We have two issues here:
> 
> 1) Religious Dimensions of Sustainable Development- in the subject line
> 2) Internet vis-a-vis religion and "lack of close scrutiny"
> 
> Perhaps within the context of Air-L you might care to elaborate on these
> statements both with respect to your definition and what you mean by the "lack
> of close scrutiny"

I'd be happy to try - but (a) I'm not precisely sure of what definition
you're asking for: definition of religious dimensions, of religion, of ...?
(I'm not trying to be tricky here - I'm just honestly not sure what the
referent of "your definition" is.)

> I am hoping you are not defining these within the bounded context of
> publish/perish academic scholarship.

This seems to suggest that I'm being asked to define "lack of close
scrutiny"? (another reason why the referent of definition is unclear to me).
And further suggests that to do so within an academic scholarship that can
only be understood as the product of a publish or perish environment may be
to commit some sort of egregious howler or fatal error?

Well, starting with the latter point first.  I recognize (on an almost daily
basis) many of the problems and limitations of scholarship and research
shaped by many (but by no means all) university demands.

That said: yes - guilty as charged: what I had in mind were the thousands
(literally) of published articles and manuscripts for review that I've been
privileged to study and analyze over the past three decades or so, and this
under a variety of hats: as a teacher (primarily in colleges, but also in
universities, both in the U.S. and abroad) with responsibilities in
philosophy and religious studies, and as an editor/researcher in a number of
fields, including computer-mediated communication, applied ethics (with a
focus on Internet research ethics) and information and computer ethics.

With this as a - perhaps highly idiosyncratic and thereby profoundly
untrustworthy - background, my sense of how far "the academy" pays (is able
to pay) attention to religious issues was sharpened by two particular
projects: one for the American Bible Society - resulting in an edited
volume, _Critical Thinking and the Bible in the Age of New Media"
(University Press of America, 2004, and the second, in working with my
Japanese colleagues Akira Kawabata and Hiroyuki Kurosaki on the theme issue,
"Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Religion and Computer-Mediated
Communication" for JCMC (Volume 12, Issue 3, April 2007).

These experiences of trying to develop an overview of - and, hopefully,
contribute to - relevant scholarship on religious studies vis-à-vis CMC and
new media reinforced the more general impression created by the broader
reading of the past 3 decades: again, compared to the thousands and
thousands of (often excellent and insightful) research articles to be found
on online communities, how young people use new media, including social
networking sites, etc., etc., etc., etc. (= "close scrutiny")
- one would be hard pressed to find much that looks at the religious
dimensions of Internet usage, including usage for development (ICT4D) (=
"lack of close scrutiny").

To be sure, there is a wonderful - and growing - community of scholars and
researchers doing just the latter (many of whom contributed, either as
authors and/or as reviewers to the JCMC issue mentioned above), and many of
whom are on this list.  I think they will confirm my sense that those who
undertake research and scholarship on the Internet vis-à-vis religious
dimensions are still comparative minorities (if not, indeed, a tiny
minority) in the larger population of Internet researchers.

Of course, I think this much too bad - certainly not as a criticism of what
the very large majority of Internet researchers chose (and are allowed) to
pursue.  But simply because in many places in the world - certainly in the
U.S., but also in much of the rest of the world outside of Europe and
Scandinavia, "religion" plays a significant-to-overwhelming role in shaping
a large majority of people's beliefs, norms, and practices, (for better and
for worse).  
Hence, it would seem that if we want to understand the Internet/internets in
its many expressions and interactions with people - in addition to
everything else currently attended to in Internet research, we will also
need to pay as much attention as possible to the religiously-shaped aspects
of these interactions as well.

Finally, I wouldn't want to preclude other ways and venues for subjecting
religion vis-à-vis the Internet to close scrutiny of various sorts (as I do,
for example, as a long-term inhabitant of the real Buckle of the Bible Belt
in the U.S. - living here forces one to become a sociologist of religion in
order to better understand one's neighbors, students, colleagues, and the
people you encounter in daily life).  Those ways of studying and trying to
understand others and how their beliefs interact with the technologies of
their daily lives are certainly useful and interesting - but I don't usually
find good ways to incorporate them (beyond serving as interesting but
potentially highly unrepresentative anecdotes) into scholarship that will be
subjected to good critical review.

This is probably way too much information, but when you ask a philosopher to
"elaborate" - well, in my case, at least, that's an invitation to prolixity.

Sorry about that - but I hope this helps answer your curiosities about what
I meant by my statements?

cheers,
- c.
> 
> 
>> And, from my perspective, the question was (is) terribly pertinent.  There
>> is, to my knowledge, and at least compared with everything else that enjoys
>> extensive and close scrutiny on the Internet, surprisingly little work on
>> the Internet vis-à-vis religion.  So I, for one, would be very interested in
>> further seeing the results of your work in this area.
> 
>> - charles ess
> 
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