This paper makes an ambitious case for integrating the humanities and social sciences, but one can’t help noticing how casually it tosses around empirical claims, especially when discussing the effects of religion on well-being, without doing the necessary legwork to support them. The authors cite a flurry of statistics linking religious attendance to reduced depression, divorce, suicide, and so on, as if these effects are settled science. But they never stop to question whether those findings actually hold up under closer scrutiny. Where’s the discussion of confounding variables, reverse causality, or even the possibility that healthier, happier people might just be more likely to attend religious services in the first place? The selective presentation of only positive outcomes, without mentioning contradictory findings or the well-known limitations of observational data, feels more like advocacy than analysis. And that’s a problem in a paper that claims to be building bridges between disciplines. If the goal is to enrich our understanding with insights from both empirical and philosophical traditions, then cherry-picking agreeable data while ignoring its methodological messiness undermines the very interdisciplinary rigor the authors are calling for.
The authors claim to present a framework for integrating “the humanities” with the social sciences. But their entire analysis rests on a shockingly narrow and unrepresentative sample of the humanities: almost exclusively Western philosophy and Christian theology. Where is history? Where is literary theory? Art history? Critical race studies? Film theory? The list goes on.
This isn’t just an oversight; it’s a critical failure of scope. They build a grand, six-point typology that is supposed to be universally applicable, but they only test it against the specific dynamics of their own specialized fields. This is like a biologist claiming to explain “animal biology” but only studying mammals.
The result is a model that is probably robust for philosophy-theology dialogues but is presented deceptively as a general truth. How can they claim their “three ways the humanities inform social sciences” are valid for all humanities when they haven’t considered how, for example, a historian’s use of archival evidence differs from a philosopher’s use of logical argument? Or how a scholar of literature enriches interpretation through narrative analysis, not just conceptual clarity?