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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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.

I've been re-reading Baym's essay on "The Emergence of On-line Community" (1998) and she helpfully breaks down, in a methdologically useful way, some of the key factors that allow online communities to be stable (and therefore significant). I would propose that questions of online community owe and important debt to the sociologists and anthropologists of the classical era. I think the classical question of the relationship between religion and society is absolutely apropos of internet research that is approached from the point of view of communication and sociology. In "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1912) Durkheim held that "it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power it has over them". He further argued that "collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons or formulae: some formulae are flags, while there are persons, either real or mythical, who are symbols." The study of societies is the study of that which people attribute a 'sacred' quality to and how they do this and why they do it in certain circumstances rather than other 'profane' or ordinary circumstances. A key research question (for me at least) would then be, what rituals, practices, emblems, and symbols, in each case of online activity, form a set of 'sacred' conditions that acts as a centre which they then imagine as the basic feature of their community? (BTW, just in case anyone takes me for a conservative, I would add that the sacred is always the most important and essential opening for the contestation of a society, and indeed, without the sense of social seriousness it brings there would be little reason to contest or resist anything.) ______________________________ Dr. David Toews, PhD Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology University of Windsor, Canada If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps be inclined to ask questions like: "What is a question?" - Wittgenstein