Description

The Luce Foundation’s Religion & Theology Program aims to promote innovative thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts, to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religious ideas and spiritual practices in the United States and beyond, and to advance public knowledge. We support knowledge makers who challenge received understandings and reconsider accepted histories, deepen appreciation for transnational influences and global interconnections, weave new religious and cultural narratives, and endeavor to imagine alternative futures.
In the context of a prevailing public discourse that is frequently shrill, polarized, acrimonious, and inhumane, the program aims to forward more complex narratives of religion in America, to contextualize and deepen understanding of a wide range of lived experiences, to broaden appreciation for religious and cultural diversity, and to imagine new religious and democratic possibilities. We seek, in particular, to amplify the voices of underrepresented knowledge makers, and this recommended special grant extends directly from that commitment.
The grant would help support the piloting of an ambitious multimedia art and storytelling project that aims to center stories of Muslim women healing from experiences of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry during the 9/11 era. Stories of these women will be accompanied by visual art, vocal recitation, and poetry, with project materials to be gathered and presented on a website intended to serve as “an online art exhibition, healing resource, publicly accessible learning tool, and historical archive. ”
Funds from the Luce Foundation’s grant in support of “99 Clay Vessels” will support the completion of a first cohort of eleven storytellers, allowing further outreach to other potential funders. This includes small stipends for individual cohort participants, as well as costs related to the facilitation of a storytelling workshop (described in detail in the proposal narrative).