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Missed Elgin because was with Kauffman, so glad to have Anne's report and Bharath's.  Yes, I suspect the interest in bridging science and art and bridging science and religion was interestingly parallel.  And the parallel was, I think, even greater if one accepts Bharath's interpretation of Elgin.  Certainly my own interest in the science/art interface is not in forcing a common language on anyone but rather in seeing how working across "divergent" activities creates new possibilities, in and of itself as well as within the different activities.  And I think that's true of Kauffman's interests in the science/religion interface.  The idea is not at all to create a new language to replace old ones but rather to make use of divergence in the service of opening new directions of exploration that can both draw from and contribute to existing ones.  Yes, as Anne says, its a "looping."

A similar idea of expansion rather than colonization or replacement in interdisciplinary work, and in cultural evolution generally, is being developed in From evolving systems to world literature, and back again?  And an underlying idea - that not everything that can be is inherent in what has been, that existing things can be used to create genuinely new things - was very much at the center of my conversations with Kauffman (see On beyond an algorithmic universe).   Yep, science and art and religion can indeed (if their practitioners so chose) all create new things that "leap out" and provide alternative "structures that we can use in making sense of what occurs around us."   If we live, or at least act as if we live, in a non-algorithmic universe.