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 ...
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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.