Where good ideas come from

April DeConick speaks passionately in defense of maintaining and deepening individual disciplines in the Humanities. This is a useful counterbalance against the move towards interdisciplinarity. However, she also supports working across disciplines. She writes,

I think that we have to look at this for what it is.  I think we need to take the discourse back to a healthy constructive place.  I think interdisciplinarity is healthy, as long as we have real disciplines that are interacting and sharing knowledge.  I think that disciplines and departments are not only necessary, but foundational.  You need strong healthy disciplines in order to work across them successfully.

I happened to pick up Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From recently and wanted to share this with you. I guess this helps explain why I have been spending more time recently outside of the field of biblical studies.