JHU SAIS Receives Luce Foundation Grant to Launch Global Politics and Religion Initiative
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JHU SAIS Receives Luce Foundation Grant to Launch Global Politics and Religion Initiative
Washington, D.C.— January 10, 2012—The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded a two-year $440,000 grant to the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) to support a program on the study of religion and international affairs.
The Global Politics and Religion Initiative (GPRI) at SAIS has three main components which will incorporate the study of the interaction between religion and politics into the school’s existing graduate-level international relations program—new master’s degree courses, faculty and community research seminars, and executive education training sessions. The initiative’s goal is to foster an appreciation and deeper understanding of religion and international affairs among students, scholars and practitioners who will shape and influence future policymaking.
“We have entered an era when the resurgence of religion’s influence has caught the majority of scholars and analysts by surprise. Religion, in many cases, appears ready to displace the spread of 20th century secularizing regimes, ideologies and social trends in defining national policy goals,” said Charles Doran, director of the SAIS Global Theory and History Program and the new initiative. “A perfect recent example of this trend is the potent role of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which survived decades of harsh repression while managing to remain politically relevant both by serving as a highly effective opposition to a corrupt secular regime and by joining the newly revitalized democratic platform.”
SAIS Dean Jessica P. Einhorn added, “This generous grant from the Luce Foundation will allow us to advance scholarly research on religion in different national contexts, while preparing students to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex world.”
The first new GPRI course, to be offered this semester, is titled Heaven on Earth: Conflict, Democracy and the Growth of Religious Toleration. Students will explore whether religious toleration is more likely within the framework of democracy and if democracy nurtures religious toleration. Two other proposed courses will address religion and international relations and religion, politics and policymaking.
This year, SAIS will begin hosting periodic faculty and community seminars on religion and politics, involving scholars from SAIS and other Johns Hopkins divisions as well as experts from area universities and the surrounding policy community in a dialogue about the role of religion in the historical and modern forms of government—particularly democracies.
The third GPRI component will be a series of executive education training sessions targeting professionals in the U.S. government, the military, nonprofit organizations, media and business. The coursework will focus on how the interaction between religion and politics affects current policy issues.
The Luce Foundation also supports SAIS’s International Reporting Project (IRP) that, as part of its mission, provides several fellowships to journalists reporting overseas on topics of religion. IRP fellows will play a role in the Global Politics and Religion Initiative, providing insights from their on-the-ground reporting trips to participants in the courses and training sessions.
SAIS received the grant through the foundation’s Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs. Announced in June 2005, this initiative aims to deepen understanding of religion as a critical but often neglected dimension of national and international policies and politics. Established in 1936, the Henry Luce Foundation seeks to bring important ideas to the center of American life, strengthen international understanding, and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities.
SAIS is one of the country’s leading graduate schools devoted to the study of international relations. Located along Embassy Row in Washington’s Dupont Circle area, the school enrolls more than 600 full-time graduate students and mid-career professionals and has trained more than 15,000 alumni in all aspects of international affairs. SAIS also has campuses in Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China.
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