Abstract
Robert Miller in an article on business ethics entitled “The four horsemen of downsizing and the Tower of Babel”1 discussed the changing demands of global markets and ecommerce. Miller argued that the information age has constructed an “epistemological Tower of Babel” similar to Alice’s Wonderland, where a word can mean so many different things, and where the core question over the battle of words is the issue of who is to be in charge and how to cope with people who are different. Miller stated that the warriors from the Information Revolution and the corporate Tower of Babel have created a condition that is breaking down a great peace, an
international power that has unified the world in language, customs, and ideologies. Religion, art, and technology, and then at a certain point, thanks to its own ungovernable complexity, collapses because the barbarians are pressing at its borders; these barbarians are not necessarily uncultivated, but they are bring new customs …. These barbarians may burst in with violence, because they want to seize a wealth that has been denied them.2
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Notes
Robert Miller, “The Four Horseman of Downsizing and the Tower of Babel,” Journal of Business Ethics 29 (January 2001): 147–152.
Michael Sutton, “Legislating the Tower of Babel: International Restrictions on Internet Content and the Market Place of Ideas,” Federal Communications Law Journal 56.2 (March 2004): 214.
John Wilkins, “Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79.2 (June 1, 2001): 302.
Jean Dryden, “A Tower of Babel: Standardizing Archival Terminology,” Archival Science 5.1 (March 2005): 1.
Herman Wasserman, “Between the Local and the Global: South African Languages and the Internet,” African and Asian Studies 1.4 (2002): 303.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of and Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1961), 30.
See William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997).
James Williams, The Bible, Violence, & the Sacred: Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 7–20.
Joy DeGruy Leary, Post-traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Milwaukee, OR: Uptone Press, 2005), 14.
Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realties (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996), 43–47.
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 1977).
W. Gunther Plaut, The Torah: A Modern Commentary (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregation, 1981), 83.
W. Sibley Towers, Genesis (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 108–109.
See Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992).
Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: A Womanist Perspective on the Trinity (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 78–79.
W. R. D. Fairbairn, Studies of Personality (London: Tavistock Publishing, 1952).
Patricia Wallace, The Psychology of the Internet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Yair Amichai-Hamburger and Katelyn Y. Mckenna, “The Contact Hypothesis Reconsidered: Interacting via the Internet,” Journal of Computer mediated Communication, Vol. 11, 3, Article 7, 1–20; Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
Harold Carter, The Prayer Traditions of Black People (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1976).
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© 2008 Anthony B. Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan
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Pressley, A.L. (2008). The Story of Nimrod: A Struggle with Otherness and the Search for Identity. In: Pinn, A.B., Callahan, A.D. (eds) African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610507_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610507_7
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