Practical Imagining: A Roundtable Discussion on Imagining the Divine and the Implications for Practice

This roundtable discussion brings together a panel of scholars to unearth and examine shared concerns and questions across this special edition, focused on God-representations, imagining God and the implications for practice. The conversation considers: the underlying values that form interdisciplinary research; the relationship between God-representations and practices; the significance of interdisciplinarity for reaching seldom-heard populations; the disciplinary goals and limits of psychology and theology; and creativity and affectivity in the future of research. Certain themes also recurred across these discussions, which map the disciplinary distinctiveness of theology and psychology while speaking to shared concerns with power, underlying epistemologies and the (ultimate) significance of the research. These reflections bring the practical importance of research on God-representations into sharp relief. Not only do God-representations interact with cosmologies, actions, identities and so on, the discourse about those representations (and how they interact with practical concerns), shapes our research practice too. The intersection of psychology and theology offers an imaginative and practical model for good practice in interdisciplinary research.