Description

The University of California, Riverside, seeks support for a collaborative project on religion and sexual abuse. Bringing together a group of scholars with expertise in studying the intersections of gender, sexuality and religion, the project will seek to analyze religion and sexual abuse beyond the boundaries that divide tradition-based scholarly subfields, as well as religious, therapeutic and academic communities. With interdisciplinary tools and varied interlocutors, the group will explore a variety of questions: How can we understand the complex circumstances and systemic factors that enable sex abuse to occur? How do certain forms of religious hierarchy tend to generate such abuse? What religious symbols and discourses are mobilized around power, secrecy, and sexuality? What are appropriate and responsible ways that scholars can support victims and communities, while also bringing the critical apparatus of scholarly analysis to these events?  
Launching with a large public conference, and continuing through a series of smaller and more focused workshops and consultations, the project will draw together representative experts across several academic disciplines, including religious studies, theology, gender and sexuality studies, psychology and social work. Attending to issues of sexual abuse in multiple religious traditions and spiritual communities—from Buddhism, Hinduism and postural yoga to Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and Judaism—project gatherings will also include diverse groups of non-academic participants, including religious leaders, community activists and social service providers. Engagement will be extended further through the project’s website.
Through these events, and through a series of related publications, the project will build upon and strengthen existing relationships with a range of partner organizations, whose participation will provide valuable knowledge while also creating a balance between theoretical questions and practical needs for reform and communal support. As the project’s leaders write in their proposal, “We, as scholars of religion, can pose critical questions about how abuse is being conceptualized, interpreted, described, and responded to. We, in turn, need to understand on-the-ground efforts to respond to abuses of power within various religious communities.”
Members of the project’s core team, each of whom will be conducting research and writing on religion and sexual abuse throughout the course of the grant, are specialists in Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and yoga. A small program of competitive mini-grants will further diversify the project’s thematic and religious reach, seeking to draw in scholars with expertise in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam. Dr. Amanda Lucia, a faculty member in religious studies at UC-Riverside, will serve as the project’s principal investigator. Northwestern University’s Robert Orsi, a leading scholar on sexual abuse in American Catholicism, will serve as its senior advisor, while also being a member of the core team.
The Luce Foundation’s grant would provide support for two large conferences, one at the beginning of the project and a second at its midpoint, as well as a series of smaller workshops, consultations, and planning meetings. Mini-grants will support both individual research projects and institutional initiatives aligned with the project’s goals, expanding its network and audiences. The Foundation’s grant would also fund project administration, research and writing, and web development and design.