Darcia Narvaez Receives Expanded Reason Award from Vatican Foundation
Award Honors Scientists and Researchers Moving Us Toward Holism and Wholeness
Vatican City State, Rome, Italy (September 28, 2017) – Darcia Narvaez, PhD, Kindred World board member and professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, received the inaugural 2017 Expanded Reason Award from the Vatican Foundation on September 28, 2017. The award for her research competed with more than 360 total entries from 170 universities and 30 countries. She received the award, including a substantial monetary prize, at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City.The significance of this award, as humanity faces global meta-crises, is critical as the award recognizes the need to heal our fragmented consciousness, resulting reductionist and “compartmentalized” sciences, and the unsustainable systems and policies they create. The award recognizes research that supports a transdisciplinary, holistic vision for humanity. Darcia Narvaez’s work provides both a transdisciplinary approach to healing human consciousness, and a holistic theory, the Evolved Nest, that provides a scaffolding for nurturing the human family to wholeness and wisdom.
About the Expanded Reason Award
According to Benedict XVI, expanded reason is defined as a way of conceiving and using reason that seeks to comprehend the full breadth of reality through a dialogue between science, philosophy and theology.
This perspective emphasizes the contributions made by the different branches of science, each with their own learning methods, to knowledge as a whole. In turn, it aims to transcend the limits of each particular type of science through a broader understanding: one prompted by questions about truth, the individual, good and meaning.
To expand reason is to open it up to these four existential questions raised in philosophy and theology, through a profound appreciation for science.
It is about creating a dialogue between different disciplines “with the utmost respect for their individual methods and mutual independence, but also aware of their intrinsic unity” [1].
In contrast to reductionism of any kind (empiricism, utilitarianism, fideism, etc.), this vision advocates expanding reason to all aspects of reality, to all forms of knowledge, and to all dimensions of the individual, which also requires creating a space for the possibility of “an encounter of faith and reason, between genuine enlightenment and religion”.
Therefore, this entails engaging the entire person: reason and faith, science and conscience, intelligence and heart.
And in contrast to the fragmentation of knowledge and hyper-specialisation, it encourages the search for a harmonious mixture of types of knowledge. “We want to move beyond the compartmentalisation and positivism that has prevailed in university lecture halls in recent decades, to propose, from a new perspective, a vision of our disciplines that encompasses humanity, surpassing the limits of each branch of science in an endless search for meaning and wholeness”.
[1] Benedict XVI, Address to the Participants of the Fourth National Ecclesial Convention of Italy, 19 October 2006.
[2] Ibid., Address at the University of Regensburg: Faith, Reason and the University. Memories and Reflections, 12 September 2006.
[3] María Lacalle Noriega, En busca de la unidad del saber. Una propuesta para renovar las disciplinas académicas, revised, expanded, bilingual 2nd edition, Madrid: Editorial UFV, 2018, p. 9.
Darcia Narvaez’s Response to the Award
Discover more about the Evolved Nest’s Ongoing Nonprofit Mission, Vision, Initiatives, and Projects
Watch the video of the inaugural ceremony at Vatican City here.
Watch Dr. Narvaez speak to the press in Rome about the award and its meaning for scholars and researchers, here.
