Joint Ventures ─ Religious Studies and Social Sciences

"Joint Venture/s" is a term used in the business world to describe two or more business enterprises that join hands and consolidate their management, operations, and labor force to increase their productivity, to offer a more diversified array of products, to increase their profitability, and be a more successful business enterprise in service to their employees and society at large. But it is not simply a matter of joining economic forces and resources. There has to be synergy, compatibility and complementarity in corporate strengths and weaknesses, in corporate missions and cultures, in corporate objectives and strategies such that the joint venture/s result/s in something greater that the mere sum of their parts. This is true of joint venture/s in the academic world. Interdisciplinary studies are not mere combinations of academic courses. They are, or should be, the mutual enrichment and mutual correction of disciplines. They can be, and are, about expanding the horizons of a discipline beyond its narrow confines and/or correcting the constricting assumptions, values, and prescriptions of doctrinaire theoretical viewpoints. These have been the basic assumption and the goal, the working framework and agenda behind the essays gathered here, as they were in my earlier collections, Critical Intersections (2006) and Creative Fractures (2011). In my teaching and writing, I seek to bring to bear insights and perspectives from religious studies and the social sciences, their critical intersections, their creative fractures, and their joint ventures to elucidate discussions, controversies, and explanations.