The Explanatory
Document
This is the field guide to the document that proves to the Expanded Reason Awards jury why your work deserves €25,000.
The purpose
Nearly every journal in every field asks academics to keep their arguments within the bounds of their discipline. You either need to cut the philosophy or cut the science. So you cut. You publish. And the search for truth, for a reason that transcends the flattening of knowledge, for an Expanded Reason, gets put in a drawer.
We at the Expanded Reason Awards run in the other direction. Convened by Universidad Francisco de Vitoria with the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI, we pay for work that crosses, and we hand you 3,000 to 8,000 words to make the whole case for yours. The rules call that document a reading guide. The jury gives it special consideration when judging fit, and it is the one part of the application still fully in your hands.
It would be easy to read it as one more form. It is the opposite of one. And it is learnable. We read the winning documents end to end and stripped them to the pattern, with the laureates’ own words where they say it better than we can. Expanded Reason in one page is page 2. The assignment is page 3. The winner DNA starts on page 4.
“This award helps highlight and promote work that escapes the limitations of disciplinary ghettos.”
David Thunder · University of Navarra · Research Laureate, 2025Reason, expanded
Before the document, the idea. These Awards were born in 2015 from a collaboration between the Vatican Foundation Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI and Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, to work against what Benedict XVI called the fragmentation of knowledge. Not against science. Against the habit of treating one method as the boundary of what can be known.
“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application.”
Benedict XVI · Regensburg, 2006 · The address the Awards grew out ofWhat it asks of a discipline
More disciplines around one table changes nothing if every discipline arrives with its assumptions intact. Expanded Reason asks a discipline to examine its own limits and stay open to what philosophy and theology can bring in. Wonder, María Lacalle told the VII Congress in Madrid this June, is the permanent condition of a truly open reason.
What it does not ask
It does not ask you to adopt a talking point, add a theological chapter, or write a manifesto. It asks where your own work already reaches the edge of its method, and what came into view there. The scholar sets the agenda.
The four questions the Institute asks of every discipline
Do you have to answer all four? No.
The call names four questions so you know the terrain. Your document does not have to cover all of them. Take up the ones your work actually answers, say which, and give them real weight. The winning documents we read gave one or two the weight and let the rest run quietly through the whole.
Questions quoted as published for the VIII call, our gloss beneath. Where a translation and the official Spanish differ, the official wording governs.
What the document is
Think of it as a reading guide to your work. It has to show why the work exemplifies Expanded Reason, and how it takes the anthropological, epistemological, ethical, and meaning questions into account. Everything on these pages is built to help you position your work in the best possible light.
The complete application
- An abstract of no more than 500 words, in Spanish or English.
- This document, 3,000 to 8,000 words, in Spanish or English.
- The work itself, in Spanish, English, Italian, or French.
- A free-format CV for every author.
- A declaration of any AI use, by phase, system, and effect.
What you do not have to do
No new research. You are explaining work you have already finished.
No committee prose either. The winning documents are argued in the first person, by an author making a case.
What remains is new writing, 3,000 words at the floor, in the five passes on page 6.
Eligible works date from the 5 years preceding the June 2026 call.
The rule, and how to read it
The rules ask the document to show why the work exemplifies Expanded Reason and how it takes the four questions into account. Read that as terrain, not a checklist. Answer one deeply and let the others run through the argument, and you have taken them into account. A paragraph filed under each heading usually has not.
A word on length
In the same edition, a 7-page document and a 21-page document won the same category. Length is not the variable. What varies is how densely the document maps its claims onto the work. Once that map exists, the 3,000-word floor is nearer than it looks.
In the late 1990s, when Simona Langella said she was studying Francisco de Vitoria, colleagues asked how it was that she did not study reality. She kept studying Vitoria, and told that story from the podium in Madrid this June. The work in the drawer is the work this document is for.
Simona Langella · University of Genova · VII Open Reason Congress, June 2026No house style.
This playbook is sequenced from winner DNA. We read winning explanatory documents end to end and set them against the laureate record, edition after edition, from political theology to evolutionary biology to the design of a teaching platform, professors on both sides of the Atlantic. Different fields, different formats, different temperaments. Underneath, the same 8 moves, every time. Treat them as load-bearing.
Each makes a case about the work. None repeats the abstract, praises interdisciplinarity in general, or walks chapter by chapter.
A short opening names the work, the live problem, the contribution, and the route ahead. The reader knows what is new before meeting any detail.
Scientific, historical, philosophical, and theological claims stay distinguishable. The document walks the passage between them and says what changed on the way.
Each identifies a reduction, a deadlock, or an inherited assumption, then shows the submitted work supplying a better way to see the problem.
Chapters, sections, sources, platform pages, and measured results carry the argument. Every major claim can be found in the work.
Specialist questions open onto teaching, public life, ecology, and meaning, inside the reasoning rather than as a closing flourish.
Roadmaps, thematic headings, numbered questions, and a compact map of the work. A reader from another field always knows where they are.
The document returns from detail to a single claim about why the whole work exemplifies Expanded Reason.
What none of them did
None treated the four questions as four equal boxes to tick. Each gave one or two the weight the argument needed and let the others run through the whole, or left them alone. You do not have to answer all four. Answer the ones your work answers, and say which. Integration reads differently from compliance, and a reader from another field can tell.
“The methodological laws that favored reason’s success have become a prison through their universalization.”
Santiago Bellomo · Dean of Education, Universidad Austral · Honorable Mention, 2025Three formulas
The 3 best strategies in the record, taken from the briefs of winning laureates and stripped to the load-bearing frame. Your material already favors one of them. Build on it, and let the work keep its own voice.
Turn each criterion into a contestable question. Set out the rival accounts, diagnose the assumption they share, state your alternative, and point the reader to the parts of the work that carry it.
Establish the contribution and the readers it is for, then develop 3 or 4 themes that together carry the anthropological, epistemological, ethical, and meaning stakes. Say plainly that you are selecting, and why.
Move from the educational need to the design, the delivery, the evidence, and the intellectual rationale. Show the design putting Expanded Reason into practice rather than naming it.
The spine under all three
The point of encounter is where the three routes differ most, and where a reader from another field reads closest. It is the moment your own method stops and something else has to speak. Locate it, mark it, and do not let it pass in a subordinate clause.
“The Pope invites us to use it in an open, not reductive, way, in an integrated, not fragmented, way.”
Daniel Sada · Rector, Universidad Francisco de Vitoria · Rome, 2025Goodbye, blank page
Kicking off your draft should start with the 5 passes below. Pass 1 is the most important to nail. Start with the claim, not the table of contents. Everyone drafts the contents first. Resist. The structure can change later, the intellectual job cannot. Pass 1 costs one sentence, and every other pass hangs from it.
Finish one sentence. This work exemplifies Expanded Reason because… If the blank only says the work is interdisciplinary, it is not yet a claim. Name what changed.
For every clause in that sentence, point to a chapter, section, component, or source. If reach matters, use verified figures and say what each one proves.
Say what your discipline can establish by its own method, what it cannot settle alone, and what philosophy or theology adds without displacing that method.
Define your terms. State your transitions. Say who the work serves. Precision and insider language are not the same thing.
Align the abstract with the document. Separate findings from implications. State your limits. Check citations, permissions, and the AI declaration.
The sentence, two ways
For research. This work exemplifies Expanded Reason because it shows that [a question your field cares about] cannot be settled by [your method] alone, and draws on [a philosophical or theological resource] to [what the argument can now do].
For teaching. Because it builds [the design] so that students run into the big questions inside [the discipline], and measures what they gained.
All three winning documents reduce to a sentence of one of these shapes.
The five-minute test
Give the draft to a colleague outside your field. After five minutes, can they state your central claim, your distinctive contribution, and which of the four questions the work takes up, and where? If not, the fault is in the opening and the signposts, not in the research.
Proof, by category
Research. Keep method, sources, findings, and the competing account visible. Teaching. Things have to happen in the classroom that cannot happen outside it, Jaime Nubiola told the VII Congress in June. Show what happened, and how you measured what students gained. Two of the three also carried third-party proof. One paragraph is enough.
“This recognition becomes a hopeful confirmation that a fruitful dialogue between particular disciplines, philosophy, and theology is still possible and meaningful.”
Juan Eduardo Carreño · Universidad de los Andes · Research Laureate, 2025How we help
We sometimes send applicants our own sourced reading of why a work fits the call, drawn from the published record and the patterns on these pages. Take it, argue with it, or ignore it. Page 7 says how to ask for one.
Where we stop
We do not write, co-write, line-edit, or approve any applicant’s document. Nobody outside the jury can tell you how it will decide, and anyone who offers to is selling you something.
Finish clean
The document should be final in argument, permissions, citations, and presentation. Submit through the official portal, and let the current rules govern anything this brief does not cover.
Editorial UFV style
- A4, Times New Roman 12 point, 1.5 line spacing, justified.
- Title page with the full title, the subtitle where relevant, and every author, coordinator, or editor.
- Table of contents without page numbers. Sections numbered decimally from 1.
- No blank lines between paragraphs. Every paragraph ends in a full stop.
- Avoid bold. Do not underline. Italics for titles, foreign words, and Latin terms.
- Quotations under three lines take quotation marks. Longer ones become indented 10-point blocks without them.
- Superscript note numbers follow the word and precede the punctuation. APA references.
- Rights-cleared images only, captioned and placed in context. Keep the source files.
Submission and special cases
- Deadline 10 March 2027. Results published 7 July 2027.
- Four prizes of €25,000 across Research and Teaching.
- Declare any AI use. Phase, purpose, system, version, and effect on the work. Expect a consent step for possible publication of the abstract or document in the awards repository.
- Related documents that form one work go in as a single PDF under one title, with a note on why they belong together.
- One complete application per distinct work.
- For a resubmission, say what has changed since the last one.
- For a team, name the coordinator or principal investigator and include a CV for every author.
On the printed copy
The Editorial UFV norms were written for book manuscripts and ask for a printed copy and a Word file. The awards portal takes digital uploads. Follow the portal for delivery and the norms for style, and check the portal before you upload.
Sources · rules checked 1 September 2026
This brief paraphrases structural patterns only, and it does not claim to state the jury’s reasons. “The complexity of the world we live in demands this.” María Lacalle, Director of the Expanded Reason Institute, said that. We are taking her at her word.
Next step
The argument that got put in a drawer is the one this jury convenes to read. Register on the portal, then write pass 1. For a second reading of whether the work fits, reply to the note that brought you this brief, abstract attached.