The Lilly Seminar on Religion and Higher Education was funded by The Lilly Endowment, Inc. as a capstone to its extensive recent effort to explore the role of religion in American academic life.  The seminar was comprised of 28 distinquished academics from diverse fields and institutions.  These scholars met twice a year over a three-year period (January, 1997 - October 1999) to consider the present dimensions and future prospects of the relationship between religion and higher education in the United States.  The Lilly Seminar not only assisted the Lilly Endowment in its own thinking about future projects in this area, but it has formulated an agenda for the early decades of the ndw millennium for enriching the relation between religion and academic endeavor.

Each year focused on one wide-open question.  The first year considered the issue of "church-relatedness" including relations between sponsoring churches and their educational institutions, campus life, and denominational identity.  The second year focused on teaching: both the teaching of religion and the role of religion in teaching.  The third year the Seminar turned its attention to the place of religion in research.  The extended notes from each meeting can be accessed below.

In March of 1997 the Seminar sponsored  Religion & Scholarship: Present Positions.  Future Prospects? a national conference held at the University of Notre Dame.  The purpose of this conference was to consider the epistemological question of what relation might come to exist between religion and mainstream academic scholarship.  Many of the papers from this conference have been included in a volume of essays to be published by the University of Notre Dame Press late spring of 2001.

MEMBER LIST

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MEETING NOTES
 

YEAR ONE:    CHURCH-RELATEDNESS

First Meeting Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 1997

Second Meeting Sept. 12-14, 1997