The seminar particularly encourages young faculty members to engage in scholarly research in the new field of science and religion, creating opportunity for them to have dialogue with each other and with scholars from around the world to give breadth to their scholarship and to give a context for refining their ideas among other scholars. The daily seminars are accompanied by workshops, discussion groups, and research counseling. Mentors are assigned to the participants based on the goals of their projects, serving as readers of the research and providing feedback to the participants. Participants are mentored in their writing by recognized scholars in science and religion.
This project is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In pursuing research at the boundary between science and religion, the John Templeton Foundation seeks to unite credible and rigorous science with the exploration of humanity's basic spiritual and religious quests. Using a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology, the Foundation draws together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of expertise on topical areas which have spiritual and theological significance ranging across disciplines from cosmology to healthcare. In 2001, the Foundation awarded over $40 million to 246 projects, studies, publications and award programs worldwide.
This program exemplifies the mission of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities to advance the cause of Christ-centered higher education and to help their institutions transform lives by faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical truth. In particular, the CCCU seeks to address the contemporary suspicion of science among evangelicals by encouraging among its member colleges a rigorous scholarly study of the relationship between science and religion.
