Today’s science and religion discussion? Are you kidding? It’s over. It never was anything but an intellectual dead end, a really bad career move. If anything at all, it was religion’s last gasp, the obsolete theologian’s desperate attempt to hang onto a job.

But then comes the surprise. Science and religion just won’t go away. Despite all its flaws and academic false starts, the fact remains that for many people, science invites awe and religion invites insight. When awe and insight engage, science-and-religion happens.

The meeting of awe and insight, I’m suggesting, is just another name for science and religion today. To me, at least, it’s never been about a new discipline or a hybrid field. So if “science and religion” as an academic discipline is on its way out, I am more relieved than saddened. From the beginning, it was not a new discipline so much as a deliberate attempt to move beyond established fields into the uncharted, open, and expanding space between fields. Science-and-religion is a mode of exploration that moves into an in-between realm, into that space that is investigated by many disciples in part but by no disciple in whole, that space otherwise neglected because it is too big to fit one method or guild. And precisely because it goes beyond the limits of disciplines, it cannot and should not be a discipline in its own right.

But we all start from somewhere or maybe from several somewheres. For example, your intellectual home base might be one of the sciences or engineering. Or it may be one of the fields of religion scholarship or, like mine, the more traditional field of constructive theology. Your starting point matters. It affects the questions you ask and the insight you seek. It also affects what you bring.

For those of us who come from religion, what do we bring to the mix? A set of well-traversed questions that stretch the human spirit and inspire the human conscience. A history of arguments about purpose, beauty, goodness, human flourishing, ecological wholeness, and whether there’s more than nature. These are standard themes in religious thought, each with a rich literature of subtle debates.

We bring them with us, but when we go beyond our discipline and enter the open space between the disciplines, we seek something new. Especially for people like me, rooted consciously in a theological tradition, the adventure of the open space is provocative, disruptive, and creative. New insight debunks old ideas. Unexpected findings open new perspectives. Surprising discoveries stretch every component of my religious view, ever renewing my theological imagination across the entire scope of what I believe. And for that reason, for me at least, science-and-religion will never go away.

The Rev. Dr. Ron Cole-Turner is the H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theology Seminary and he blogs at Enhancing Theology.

My work with acquired savants has convinced me (and others) that dormant savant-like abilities do exist within us all. The nature and extent of that dormant potential varies from person to person and the specific “talent” is distributed in the usual bell-shaped curve. We are not all little Mozarts or Picassos in waiting. But to see a person neither interested nor skilled in math suddenly understanding “the rules of mathematics” after a head injury, or someone with certain forms of dementia suddenly able to paint or sculpt, sometimes at a prodigious level, points toward what I call “a little Rain Man” within us all. I address the background in much more detail on the savant syndrome website under “Is There a Little Rain Man in Each of Us?”

The point is that we don’t start life with a blank disk and become only what we put on that disk from experience and learning. Rather, through genetic memory, the brain comes with a great deal of dormant “software” or capacity already loaded. That is what is often tapped in the acquired savant. The challenge, of course, is how to tap that dormant potential without some central nervous system catastrophe, and work on conscious cognitive, technical, and what I call “rummaging around in our right hemisphere” methods are under study. I address that in more depth in the “Accessing the ‘Inner Savant’ Within Us All” chapter in my book Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired and Sudden Savant.

So the acquired savant documents, for me, the presence of dormant potential within us all, and work is under way on techniques to access that “little Rain Man within us all” in non-intrusive ways.

Dr. Darold Treffert is a psychiatrist who has been studying savant syndrome for more than 40 years and the author of the books Extraordinary People and Islands of Genius.

Yes, the research we conducted may indicate that those who laugh less in everyday life do have a diminished sense of humor and may indeed be more self-deceptive. It is often difficult and irresponsible to determine the causal direction of any correlation, but yes, it is possible and perhaps likely (given the strength of the association we report) that self-deceptive individuals are less likely to understand certain types of humor and this may result in an impaired sense of humor (e.g. I don’t find anything funny about making fun of blacks, women, … ).

Robert Lynch is a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

An important clarification to make is that our study found that women biologists and physicists in general (regardless of whether they have children) engage in more outreach than men in the same disciplines.

On the one hand, it could be because women scientists who are parents tend to be more involved in child rearing than their male counterparts, giving them a more intimate sense of the lack of science education in our nation and a greater desire to do something to better translate science to the broader public. On the other hand, women may be more involved than men in outreach because outreach is seen by university administrators and department heads as more of a feminine than masculine task, meaning that women may receive greater subtle pressure to engage in science outreach activities.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a professor of sociology, a scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, and the director of the Religion and Public Life Program at the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice University.