Emory receives $3.2 million for new center on religion
9/8/2000 News media contact: Tim Tanton · (615) 742-5470 · Nashville, Tenn. By Elaine Justice* ATLANTA (UMNS) - United Methodist-related Emory University has received a five-year, $3.2 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to help establish a new Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion.
"Emory aspires to make religion one of the five or six cardinal themes that suffuses its scholarship and defines its educational mission nationally and internationally," said Emory Provost Rebecca Chopp in announcing the grant. "Emory faculty are doing path-breaking work in the study of religion and practice, religion and the professions, and comparative religions. This support will help the university to become a permanent center for world-class religious scholarship."
The new center will be housed at Emory Law School, and will draw the university's Law and Religion Program into collaboration with a variety of other initiatives and institutions on campus, including the Candler School of Theology, the Graduate Division of Religion and the Department of Religion. John Witte Jr., director of the Law and Religion Program and Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law, will head the center.
"This new center will provide an extraordinary opportunity to bring to Emory a steady diet of world-class scholars of religion and to bring to the world a steady diet of premier scholarship on religion," Witte said. "This is quite a blessing and a challenge."
During the grant period, the university will match the grant with $1.6 million of fiscal and in-kind contributions. Upon expiration of the grant in 2005, the center will be supported by $10 million in permanent endowment funding.
The new center "will play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of religion's contribution to public life, and in helping to create an informed citizenry," said Luis Lugo, director of the Religion Program at Pew Charitable Trusts.
Pew Charitable Trusts has made four major grants to Emory's Law and Religion Program in the past decade to fund multiyear research and publication projects. With the latest grant, Emory joins Yale, Princeton and Notre Dame, each of which recently has received Pew funding to establish centers for interdisciplinary religious scholarship.
After a planning year in 2000-2001, Emory's new center will sponsor a series of two-year conversations, research and study on broad religious themes such as marriage and the family, or the Golden Rule. Each two-year study will culminate in the publication of four to six books, dozens of articles and other writings, a video and electronic library of new scholarly resources, new networks of scholars and a major international conference.
The Pew Charitable Trusts makes strategic investments to help organizations and citizens develop practical solutions to problems. In 1999, with $4.9 billion in assets, it granted more than $250 million to 206 organizations.
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*Justice is assistant director of university communications at United Methodist-related Emory University in Atlanta.
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