John P. Hogan and Denis J. Hynes * Religion
and Development TIID February 2001
Arguments
and Outcomes for a "Religion and Development" Perspective
(A) Arguments
- for
participant populations religion provides the widest cultural lens for
understanding a community's sense of space, lime, history and identity
- for
participant populations religious cosmologies often underpin the stock of
local knowledge
- for
participant populations the religious dimension of everyday life speaks most
directly and dramatically to the human universals of suffering and happiness
- for
many participant populations at the edges of the world capitalist system,
"development" is a moral as well as a technological phenomenon,
often experienced as an evil
- for
many development practitioners, development work is often experienced as a
calling
- for development practice, much of the
North-South partnership relationships which will be formed in the next
millennium will involve faith-based organizations which are grounded
in a particular religious vision of the world
- for
students of culture and development practitioners, religions and in
particular the so-called "World Religions' of Christianity,
Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism- constitute the
oldest surviving human institutions. The conversion process still underway
to these religions is a privileged window to specific cognitive and
emotional changes which are characteristic of so-alled
"modernity."
(B) Outcomes
- to
enable the development practitioner to recognize where and how religion
enters the development picture, and thus to have a better grasp of the
cognitive aspects of "participation" ("developer's
logic" and "participants' logic")
- to
prepare development practitioners for a specific cultural rationality in the
behavior of participants to project initiatives, one often conditioned by
religious beliefs
- to
sensitize development practitioners to the specifically religious dimensions
of development work in his/her own culture and thus
- to
challenge development practitioners on the adequacy of existing models for
project participation, design, implementation and evaluation