Release date: Aug. 19, 2004
Contact: Elaine Justice at 404-727-0643 or elaine.justice@emory.edu

Emory Awarded Grants for Religion, Law Research

Emory University's Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion and its Law and Religion Program have received three new grants totaling $580,000 to support research and service initiatives.

A grant of $500,000 from the McDonald Agape Foundation in Michigan is funding a five-year project on Christian jurisprudence that will bring together a team of leading Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian scholars to develop a dozen new volumes on historic and contemporary Christian understandings of the law. The project will feature several public forums and conferences as well as a number of public policy statements and initiatives. John Witte Jr., director of CISR and of the Law and Religion Program, and Frank Alexander, co-director and founder of the Law and Religion Program, will lead the project. Chairman of the McDonald Agape Foundation is Emory trustee emeritus Alonzo L. McDonald.

The Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis is providing a grant of $50,000 to develop a pair of volumes on the modern marriage movement from an interdisciplinary perspective. One volume will be a collection of writings on marriage and family by Don S. Browning, Robert W. Woodruff Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Religious Studies at Emory from 2001-2003. The second will be an anthology of chapters documenting the latest research in family studies from the fields of law, theology, ethics, history, anthropology, psychology, feminist studies and economics.

A third grant of $30,0000 from the Smart Growth America-National Vacant Properties Campaign will support Alexander's work in providing technical assistance to selected cities and counties on strategies for dealing with vacant, abandoned and tax delinquent properties. Alexander's initiative is part of a decade-long project on affordable housing, urban redevelopment, and state and local housing law.

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