Description

In 2015, the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs supported the launch of what would become the Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs, an initiative designed to foster new connections between scholars and journalists covering international affairs. Supported by a series of grants (totaling more than $3 million), this Luce/ACLS Program became a signature initiative of the HRLI in its later years. Notably, key projects supported by the Luce/ACLS Program seeded larger grant-funded projects supported by the Luce Foundation’s Theology Program, including innovative work based at both Arizona State University and Northeastern University, and the Luce/ACLS Program’s attention to the importance of advancing public knowledge about religion represented a key point of intersection between the work of the HRLI and the Theology Program.
In its engagements with non-academic knowledge makers, the Luce/ACLS Program has focused centrally on connecting scholars and journalists. At the same time, both Luce and ACLS are invested in thinking creatively about a wider set of knowledge communities and their relations with one another, actual and potential. As the HRLI winds down its work – with no new grants being made, but dozens of active grants still under management (including one to ACLS) – and following the Foundation’s announcement early last year of the launch of a newly envisioned Religion and Theology Program, which builds upon the Foundation’s longstanding attention to religion and theology through both its Theology Program and the HRLI, the project funded by this special grant will allow both ACLS and the Luce Foundation to reflect on the work of the Luce/ACLS Program and related initiatives, and to place them in a wider context of efforts to advance public knowledge.
A central component of the project will be the convening of a working group focusing substantially though not exclusively on the topic of religion (in keeping with the open quality of the Foundation’s religion-related support for the ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships). In conjunction with ongoing activities supported by the current HRLI grant in support of the Luce/ACLS Program, the efforts of the working group will afford Luce and ACLS the opportunity to assess the current state of play in the production of public knowledge, and to consider how this might inform future Luce/ACLS partnerships, particularly in the area of religion. At the same time, the working group’s mandate is not limited to this frame, and it is anticipated that the results of its work will have a range of wider benefits for the field at large. The future of the Luce/ACLS Program, or any new initiatives that might emerge from it and related work, is yet to be determined, and this project does not involve any definite commitments or understandings in that regard. The spirit of the project is exploratory.
Seeking to advance public knowledge of religion, and to seed and grow initiatives on religion, democracy, and public culture, the Luce Foundation’s Religion and Theology Program aims to build a robust network of public knowledge makers through the funding of efforts to intervene in multiple publics, communities, fields, and sectors. We anticipate that learnings from this ACLS project will have the potential to contribute meaningfully to the extension of these efforts, particularly in a period when the Religion and Theology Program is deliberately seeking ways to expand its range of organizational and institutional partnerships.