News and Information
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: March 30, 1999
Contact: Elaine Justice, Assistant Director

Emory's Witte Receives Four-Year Lillly Grant, Prestigious Kuyper Prize From Princeton

John Witte, director of Emory University's Law and Religion Program, has received a four-year $546,350 grant from the Lilly Endowment to prepare four new books, related articles and public lectures on law, religion and the Reformed tradition.

Collectively, Witte's research findings are expected to make a case for a distinctive Protestant theology, jurisprudence and ethic addessed to some of today's most pressing issues-marriage, family and sexuality; freedom, human rights and rule of law; and authority, church-state relations and constitutional order.

The four main volumes planned for the project include: "John Calvin on Sex, Marriage and Family Life"; "The Reformation of Rights"; "Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Calvinist Reformation"; and "From Contract to Covenant: Re-making the Family in America," which will be a sequel to his 1997 book, "From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion and Law in the Western Tradition."

This is the largest single grant to Emory's Law and Religion Program to date. Founded in 1982, the program has received grants totaling more than $2.8 million during the past decade. Under Witte's direction, The Pew Charitable Trusts has sponsored multi-year international research and publication projects on Christianity and democracy, religious human rights and the problem of proselytizing in newly democratized regions of the world. The program also has assumed direction of the Religion and Human Rights Project, previously housed at Human Rights Watch in New York.

Witte also has been named recipient of this year's Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life, awarded by Princeton Theological Seminary. The award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, is presented each year to an outstanding scholar or community leader who has contributed to the development of Reformed theology, particularly as it relates to law, business, technology, education, economics and the arts. It is given in honor of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), theologian, church leader and prime minister of The Netherlands, founder of the Free University of Amsterdam.

Witte will receive the award at a ceremony April 7 at Princeton, where he will give a lecture titled "God's Joust, God's Justice: The Revelations of Legal History."