annot properly be
termed "development".

A central challenge, therefore--and an enormous one--is the expansion of
scientific and technological activity. Instruments of social and economic
change so powerful must cease to be the patrimony of advantaged segments
of society, and must be so organized as to permit people everywhere to
participate in such activity on the basis of capacity. Apart from the
creation of programs that make the required education available to all who
are able to benefit from it, such reorganization will require the
establishment of viable centers of learning throughout the world,
institutions that will enhance the capability of the world's peoples to
participate in the generation and application of knowledge. Development
strategy, while acknowledging the wide differences of individual capacity,
must take as a major goal the task of making it possible for all of the
earth's inhabitants to approach on an equal basis the processes of science
and technology which are their common birthright. Familiar arguments for
maintaining the status quo grow daily less compelling as the accelerating
revolution in communication technologies now brings information and
training within reach of vast numbers of people around the globe, wherever
they may be, whatever their cultural backgrounds.

The challenges facing humanity in its religious life, if different in
character, are equally daunting. For the vast majority of the world's
population, the idea that human nature has a spiritual dimension--indeed
that its fundamental identity is spiritual--is a truth requiring no
demonstration. It is a perception of reality that can be discovered in the
earliest records of civilization and that has been cultivated for several
millenia by every one of the great religious traditions of humanity's
past. Its enduring achievements in law, the fine arts, and the civilizing
of human intercourse are what give substance and meaning to history. In
one form or another its promptings are a daily influence in the lives of
most people on earth and, as events around the world today dramatically
show, the longings it awakens are both inextinguishable and incalculably
potent.

It would seem obvious, therefore, that efforts of any kind to promote
human progress must seek to tap capacities so universal and so immensely
creative. Why, then, have spiritual issues facing humanity not been
central to the development discourse? Why have most of the
p