[Air-L] Religious Dimension of Sustainable Development

[Charles Ess]

> 
> Thanks charles for your long and insightful response
most welcome, and likewise -
> 
> 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.
and for this same reason, I'm skipping past your first point, as more of a
comment that can stand on its own ...
> 
<snip>
 
> 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.
Well, perhaps I'm just plumb ignorant - but no, sorry to say, I'm not aware
of a large body of literature here: so a bibliography would be appreciated!
> 
> 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
yes - and one time when I did this, it came up with more hits than "sex"
(!!!).  But the presence of words in web pages does not a serious inquiry
make ...
> 
> 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.
and I'm happy to say, I think (FWIW) several people on the list have made a
number of thoughtful and insightful contributions to just this theme.
> 
> 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.
right - but to my knowledge, every "nature-philosopher" (as
philosopher-scientists were called in Pre-Socratic times) has had to face
these exigencies as well.  Of course they have an impact / influence - the
trick is to be aware of these and move on, I think.
> 
> 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.
> 
roger that!

again, thanks -

- c.