Release date: Sept. 7, 2006

Emory Center Receives Religious Freedom Grant

Contact: April L. Bogle: 404-712-8713 or abogle@law.emory.edu
Contact: Elaine Justice: 404-727-0643 or elaine.justice@emory.edu

Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR) has been awarded a $750,000 grant by the Alonzo L. McDonald Agape Foundation for a research project on "The Christian Foundations of Religious Freedom and Rule of Law."

John Witte Jr., CSLR director and Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law, will serve as the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Foundation Distinguished Professor and lead the project, which runs September 2007-December 2010. He is expected to generate three new books and a series of articles and public lectures.

The books will focus on church-state relations in the Western tradition; religion and human rights in Christian perspective; and the uses of the law in church, state, family and other authority structures. The articles and lectures will explore the Christian foundations of law.

A specialist in legal history, marriage and religious liberty, Witte is undertaking this project because of his concern about "the growing inability of the modern churches to engage the hard legal, political and social issues of today with doctrinal rigor, moral clarity and biblical authenticity."

Witte adds that he hopes "to help individual Christians participate in the public square in a manner that is neither dogmatically shrill nor naively nostalgic, but fully equipped with the revitalized resources of the Bible and the Christian tradition."

A prolific writer, Witte has published 120 articles, eight journal symposia and 18 books, and has seven more books under contract. His writings have appeared in German, French, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Romanian translations. He has lectured and convened conferences throughout North America, Western Europe, Israel, South Africa and Japan. As CSLR director, he has led more than 10 major, multi-year research projects which have produced more than 100 new books. In addition, he has been selected eight times by the students at Emory University School of Law as the "Most Outstanding Professor" and has won numerous other major awards for his teaching and research.

The grant is the second bestowed on the CSLR from the McDonald Agape Foundation. It awarded $500,000 to the CSLR in 2004 for a five-year project on Christian jurisprudence. That project has commissioned a series of 24 new books, 17 of which are placed with major university presses, and resulted in several public forums on issues related to law, religion and society.

"Our directors are extremely pleased with the outstanding work of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, particularly with the superb progress of the Christian Jurisprudence Project," says Alonzo L. McDonald, chairman of the McDonald Agape Foundation. "We welcome this opportunity to be sponsoring partners for this commitment which we trust will be enormously productive and fit perfectly with our foundation's mission."

McDonald is trustee emeritus of Emory University and has had a distinguished career in business, government and academia. He established the foundation more than 10 years ago to support Christ-centered activities.

The CSLR has received more than $9 million in project funding from the McDonald Agape Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, Lilly Endowment, John Templeton Foundation and Steinhardt Foundation, among others. These monies have been used for international research on a range of topics from Christian, Islamic and Jewish legal studies to sex, marriage and family, to children and the law.

The CSLR is home to world-class scholars and forums on the religious foundations of law, politics and society. It merged with Emory's distinguished Law and Religion Program in 2005 and now offers four joint degree programs, 14 cross-listed courses, eight major research projects and dozens of individual and small collaborative research projects, several annual public forums, two book series, more than 300 published volumes, a visiting scholars and fellows program and 79 senior fellows and associated faculty from more than 20 fields of study.

Emory University is known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities. For nearly two decades Emory has been named one of the country's top 25 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.

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