What is it about?
The author identifies a relative lack of secular theoretical attention paid to library and information service issues involving the religious beliefs of users. Drawing on culturally pragmatic and secular standpoints, including understandings of the deep structures of cultures and multiple modernities, the author offers suggestions to secular academics and other investigators for developing the research and theory appropriate for advising library and information practitioners who are providing services that can be impacted by the religious beliefs of actual and potential users.
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Why is it important?
In Anglophone and Francophone North America, as well as much of Europe, secular theorists throughout the social sciences, as well as other fields and disciplines, are increasingly engaging with the impact of denominational and personal religious phenomena on nations and their cultures. A relative lack of attention has been paid to such issues in the information and library English language literatures of both continents. Due to the extended effort of the Academy to escape the constraints of religious control, such professorial absence may be understandable but it is far from helpful for practitioners.
Perspectives
At a time of permeable national borders and extensive migrations of religious believers, library and information practitioner interactions with members of faith traditions are likely to multiply. Unfortunately, information and library educators have avoided their obligation to prepare aspiring practitioners for careers in contexts where faith traditions are likely to be increasingly encountered.. As a secular cultural pragmatist, the author, in the tradition of the pragmatic philosopher William James and his The Varieties of Religious Experience, has felt compelled to encourage theoretical involvement in this aspect of the changing information world.
Bill Crowley
Dominican University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Developing Information and Library Theory for a Conflicted Paradigm World, Libri, January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/libri-2015-0034.
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