Voices from the Next Generation
with Michael Hogue and Lea F. Schweitz, “Exploring Humanity and Our Relations”; Paul Voelker, “Materialist Spirituality?”; Andrea Hollingsworth, “The Ambiguity of Interdisciplinarity”; Jason P. Roberts, “Emerging in the Image of God to Know Good and Evil”; Stephen Edward McMillin, “Faith‐Based Social Services: From Communitarian to Individualistic Values”; and Steven Cottam, “Self‐Control Failure in Catholicism, Islam, and Cognitive Psychology”

THE AMBIGUITY OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Abstract.  What kind of consciousness is best prepared to undertake effective interdisciplinary explorations in religion and science in our twenty‐first century context? This paper draws on the thought of theologian David Tracy and psychologist and philosopher of religion James W. Jones to suggest that negation and ecstasy are mutually conditioning factors that go into the shaping of just such a consciousness. Healthy, constructive modes of relating to the disciplinary other imply the emergence of a transformed way of knowing and being wherein the scholar countenances the loss of controlling and autonomous ways of relating (negation), and precisely in that loss, enters into shared spaces of mutually illuminative and transformative understanding (ecstasy).