New Series: Blogs from the America Academy of Religion
In November, 2011, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation held several panels at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California. Two of these panels focused on the topics of “Religion & the Internet” and “Religious Minorities and Human Rights”.
Participants from the Faith & Globalisation Network and beyond presented their research on various issues relating to these two topics. Starting next week, we’ll begin posting blogs from these participants summing up their presentations, beginning with Religion & the Internet. Below is a brief summary of what’s in store:
Religion & the Internet
Professor Heidi Campbell considers how the internet’s provision of instant connectivity, interactive access to diverse information sources, and the ability to transcend geographical and hierarchical boundaries is presenting challenges to ‘bounded communities’ – those groups that actively seek to distance themselves from others in order to maintain a cohesive identity.
Like Heidi Campbell, Dr. Rohit Chopra focuses on the impact of the internet on a particular community. But unlike the situation of the ‘bounded communities’ in Prof Campbell’s paper, this presentation considers Hinduism and how the internet is leading to it being conceived as a ‘global ethnicity’.
Dr. Gregory Grieve analyzes online Buddhist meditation at the Upaya Mountain Sangha, a Second Life “cybersangha” whose main activity is silent meditation. He suggests that such online meditation shows that while silence may be taken for granted as inevitable in shaping the depth and richness of meditative practices, its social meaning depends on context.
Prof Stewart Hoover reflects on how the common and overly simplistic understanding of the internet’s influence on social and religious practices masks the truly important question facing us today – how does the internet particularize, relativize and challenge religious authority?
Religious Minorities & Human Rights
Dr. Daniel Cere highlights the Canadian perspective, noting that while various forms of European multiculturalism do appear to be performing poorly, in the land of its birth, multiculturalism appears to be still flourishing.
Prof Arvind Sharma explains that while the global acceptance of human rights discourse, as normative in some sense, is a major achievement, this achievement has come with a predicament. He notes that the universality of the discourse tends to cloak those groups of human beings who might need special attention. With universality comes indivisibility, and with indivisibility comes the invisibility for such sections.
John Hartley’s presentation sought to press our imaginations beyond the realms of our own orthodoxy. It seems appropriate to understand the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the accompanying human rights movement as the assertion of an orthodox creed of human rights.
