[Air-L] Religious Dimension of Sustainable Development

[tom abeles]

Thanks charles for your long and insightful response

Please note that I have not included your response because the listserv limits the size of the posting to 10KB which means that an extensive response and quoting will lead to a rejection of the post.

First, you threw in an interesting aside towards the end (ICT4D) which is a critical arena. What has made this interesting and relevant for this list is that some time ago I was a member of several lists in this area where I raised serious objections to an effort to "legitimize" this arena by establishing an academic journal so that scholars could be formally and appropriately certified for their work, pub/perish, to receive promotion and tenure. In other words, the need to support academics weighed equal to or greater than serious interest and substantive study. That concern lead to my being removed from the list rather than an addressment of the issue at hand. It is an issue worth discussing, given the similar but far more relevant and acrimonious problems within the established arena of economics. 

But it is relevant here only with regards to what research may come from participants in AIR and how it may be tempered or colored by this need within The Academy. As editor of On the Horizon, http://www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm  I am always interested in thoughtful articles in this area

Second, as you know from your extensive experience, there really is a large body of literature wrt religion and both ICT's and sustainability, separately and overlapping both in their intersection in practice and at the metalevel or the study of such activity. Here one is not certain where those on this AIR-L have a dominant interest. 

My sense is that the questions which you raise are in one sense
rhetorical in that a search on Google of the terms "religion" and
"internet" received in 0.2 seconds 20,000,000 hits and similarly a
search on "religion" and "sustainability" in .22 seconds received
450,000 hits and a combined request received 381, 000 hits

Again, at the meta level, it calls for a more systemic look at social issues. What we have here is the after shock of the Enlightenment. Of course, one of the drivers for the Enlightenment was the shaking off of the shackles that the Church placed on countries and intellectual thought. It was due in part to the success of modern science in the 17th century. One of the spectacular failures of this thinking was the almost dogmatic acceptance of the ability of the social research arena to be able to use such methods with equal effectiveness. One of these problems has been the reductionist view of a subject area.

This raises some serious issues with respect to how folks in the AIR arena choose to define how research is done and how it is measured and interpreted.

The issue seems to be at the meta level on one hand and at the very micro-level on the other where the details need to be puzzled through. What one has to be concerned about first, is what is of interest to "me" as a searcher/researcher. The next issue has to be how much of that interest is determined by my needs such as job requirements or immediate responsibilities, including pub/perish.

What the internet tells us, of course, is that open access to lists such as this creates an interesting mixture of participants and immediate exposure to anyone who sticks their head above the trench by posting.

tom

tom abeles


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