Description

The Luce Foundation’s Theology Program aims to advance scholarly and public understanding of religion and theology. In recent years, it has done so primarily through grants to seminaries, divinity schools, and research universities. While the program has encouraged projects that work at the intersection of theological inquiry and the multidisciplinary study of religion, including those involving institutional collaborations, funded projects involving substantial partnerships between independent seminaries and research universities have thus far been relatively rare. The proposed project, which would support ongoing collaboration between New Brunswick Theological Seminary (NBTS) and Rutgers University’s Center for Cultural Analysis (CCA), as well as coLAB Arts (a humanities and arts nonprofit based in New Brunswick), represents a novel and promising exception.
The immediate context for the proposed grant is a series of Theology Program grants approved over the last several months. Drawing on the efforts of a set of existing Luce Foundation partners, the Theology Program established a networked initiative involving 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, 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).
As part of this initiative, in May 2020 the Theology Program recommended an urgent needs grant to NBTS. Conceived in dialogue with colleagues at Rutgers, coLAB, and the Reformed Church of Highland Park Affordable Housing Corporation (RCHP-AHC), the project asks: “What does it mean to shelter in place when you have no shelter?” The majority of the urgent needs grant is supporting efforts of the Affordable Housing Corporation, a 501c3 organization housed at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, next door to New Brunswick, which is providing homes and services for several families and individuals whose housing and other basic needs, such as the purchasing of food and medicine, have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside this provision of direct community aid, NBTS is developing related initiatives to consider challenges to human flourishing, to document stories of resilience, and to interpret complex social issues in the period of COVID-19. This work includes a collaborative public history project and the curation of artistic contributions intended to document the experience of vulnerable communities during the pandemic.
The newly proposed project at Rutgers, which would find its home in the Center for Cultural Analysis, seeks to develop additional and related work alongside the experimental and thoughtfully composed initiatives supported by the Foundation’s earlier grant to NBTS. As the project’s leaders write in their proposal, The Shelter Project is conceived as “an innovative development of the public humanities during a moment of extended social crisis.” The primary activities to be supported by the proposed grant to Rutgers will be a podcast and related webpage, artistic and theological reflections on curated stories and episodes, and curricular development at Rutgers University and at New Brunswick Theological Seminary (NBTS).
 
The proposed work aligns with the Theology Program’s continuing emphasis on public engagement on the part of both research universities and theological education institutions, as well its support for creative uses of digital technologies. While not specifically conceived as an emergency grant, the work to be supported would respond directly to challenges and constraints introduced and amplified by COVID-19.