Description

The Theology Program aims to advance scholarly and public understanding of religion and theology, and currently does so primarily through grants to seminaries, divinity schools, and research universities. From time to time, the program also considers and recommends grants to media organizations, museums and cultural institutions, and professional societies and scholarly associations. This proposed discretionary grant to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) falls into that latter category.
Taking a capacious understanding of religious practice and theological inquiry, the Theology Program approaches religion and theology not simply as abstract concepts, but as lived realities. Promoting public-facing scholarship, the program’s work seeks to be informed both by the Luce Foundation’s dedication to long-term commitment in philanthropy and by a recognition that innovation and change require fresh ideas, creative risk-taking, and the reimagination of possibilities in light of persistent and seemingly intractable problems.
The immediate context for the proposed grant is a series of Theology Program grants approved in April, May, June, and July. Drawing on the efforts of a set of existing Luce Foundation partners, the Theology Program has sought to establish a networked initiative that involves rapid responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects in a number of cities and regions across the United States. The bulk of these grants have gone to seminaries, divinity schools, and research universities (and, most recently, to the Leadership Institute of the Santa Fe Indian School), for a diverse array of projects that all involve two core elements: (1) support for community engagement and community-based partners and organizations responding to the pandemic; and (2) aligned efforts to document, and create contexts for the expression of, the experiences of vulnerable communities under the pandemic (through oral histories, the collection of testimonies, virtual research, community forums, media projects, and support for artists and local arts communities).
Alongside grants supporting nearly a dozen such community-engaged projects, the Theology Program has also made a substantial contribution in support of the new Leading Edge Fellowship recently launched by the American Council of Learned Societies, which aims to put the power of humanities scholarship and training to work in addressing urgent challenges facing communities hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Related Theology Program urgent needs grants to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the SSRC are providing support for rapid response social scientific research on the pandemic and its effects, seeking to increase public understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on religious practices, communities, and organizations. Indeed, the Theology Program’s April 2020 COVID-19 emergency grant of $250,000 to the SSRC was the first such grant the program recommended this past spring.
This earlier grant allowed the SSRC to launch a Virtual Research Center on COVID-19 and the Social Sciences (https://covid19research.ssrc.org). The Luce Foundation’s grant has supported the SSRC’s efforts to rapidly mobilize the social science community to contribute knowledge and analysis of the impact of COVID-19. This includes initial efforts to design the virtual research center, conceived as a digital platform and resource for scholars, media, and the public; the production and distribution of digital content and resources; the organization of virtual working groups; and the funding of small grants to support rapid research.
The SSRC’s call for proposals for rapid research grants yielded more than 1300 applications from scholars across a wide range of disciplines, institutions, and countries, far exceeding the Council’s expectations. Currently, the SSRC has dedicated funding of $100,000 for these rapid research grants, with an anticipated average grant size of $5,000.  Given these numbers, it appears highly likely that many promising projects will not receive support. The SSRC is aiming to increase the number of grants it might offer, and following additional conversations and consultations the Council requests further support from the Luce Foundation’s Theology Program. This would amplify the SSRC’s capacity to fund research focused on religious and theological understandings of pandemic, on the role of religious ideas, practices, and organizations in responding to the pandemic, and on other related topics. Supported researchers will be expected to contribute at least one essay to the digital forum of SSRC’s Religion and the Public Sphere program (which in the past month has initiated a series of essays on Covid-19). They will also be encouraged to produce other public writing based on their funded research.
The role of religious ideas, practices, and organizations in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a key component of the SSRC’s wider initiative thus far, and we hope that both the Luce Foundation’s earlier funding and its modest additional grant support for research projects might further encourage that emphasis. At a minimum, this funding will afford the SSRC a small amount of additional bandwidth to support a somewhat larger number of worthy and compelling research projects on religion and COVID-19.