Campus Conversation on Values

Based in the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies and led by Kroc Director Scott Appleby, this multi-stage, multi-year research and peacebuilding initiative brings together practitioners, educators, and scholars to develop a richer understanding of the interactions between and among secular institutions and religious groups, beginning with the two largest faith communities: Muslims and Catholics. They will also investigate key contemporary issues such as...

The Immanent Frame is an interdisciplinary blog sponsored by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and dedicated to exploring the nexus of religion, secularism, and public life. Invited contributors and respondents are leaders in their academic disciplines and subfields. The site also permits comments to entries by the online readership. Recent blog entries and accompanying discussions have focused on democracy in the Muslim world, Islam and the secular state, the 2008 terrorist attacks...

The "Religion in the Public Square" initiative is the Ford Foundation's contribution to the development of a more reasoned understanding of how religion and religious communities take part in American civic life. It aims to support those communities and programs that it believes best embody religious life's promise to serve the public and better the world. The initiative is a grant making program: it provides capital to organizations that exhibit growth potential and can contribute insight...

Sponsored by the Aspen Institute and launched approximately 60 years ago, the Aspen Seminar on Leadership, Values, and the Good Society is the Institute's oldest and original program designed to promote deeper thought and value-based reflection in leadership and positions of power. The program convenes 15 to 20 top leaders in business, politics, and academia to discuss and reinforce humanist values and their importance in all fields of professional affairs. The program uses classical and...

The German Research Foundation's Transformation of Religion in the Modern Age initiative examines how shifts in individual identity formation over the second half of the 20th century have influenced both the organizational presence of the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches and religiosity expressed through individual and collective behavior. The initiative is especially interested in explaining the increasingly ambivalent relationship between European societies and religion as...

Operated by the Brookings Institution, the Budgeting for National Priorities Project is a research program dedicated to the discussion and public promotion of fiscal responsibility in federal budget policy. By finding common ground and looking beneath the larger ideological conflict surrounding issues of government spending and thrift, the project hopes to evolve and develop policy that more ably meets the needs of the American public. It has hosted the Fiscal Seminar since 2005, in which...

Sponsored by the New America Foundation in conjunction with Arizona State University and Zócalo Public Square, the Center for Social Cohesion is dedicated to the study of the dynamics of social unity and strife between peoples of disparate heritage and ideological backgrounds in a given society. Through its study, the center hopes to enable policymakers to better confront the challenges facing America today, such immigration, partisanship, the disintegration of impartial fact-based media,...

Sponsored by the Brookings Institution, the Center for Social Dynamics and Policy is dedicated to the quantitative analysis of social issues. Rather than conversation and commentary, the center employs computational modeling and simulation in an effort to calibrate and predict the outcomes of policy initiatives and acknowledge the complex systems and diverse factors that contribute to social change. The center's modeling takes into account numerous variables, ranging from time delays in...

Sponsored by the Brookings Institution, the Center on Children and Families is dedicated to the study and creation of policy that prioritizes the needs of the nation's children, particularly focusing on issues related to the growth of single-parent families over the last three decades and the availability of basic educational resources that can enhance economic mobility, especially for children from low-income families. Through its Social Genome Projects, the center works to craft a...

Sponsored by the Lab at the Safra Center for Ethics in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the Project on Institutional Corruption is a 5-year-long (2009-13) research endeavor to investigate those institutional practices that work to undermine the ethical integrity of a particular institution in the eyes of the public. Rather than a study of conventional, more individualistic forms of corruption (i.e. bribery, nepotism, etc.), the study focuses on norms within a given industry that have...

Sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, the Program on American Citizenship is a research initiative focused on the evaluation and the investigation of the fundamental principles behind "citizenship" today. The program focuses especially on how America's civic institutions and associations play crucial roles in the maintenance of a healthy, vibrant democracy. It hopes to help the public better understand what the nature of dutiful "citizenship" entails by cataloging seminal works on...

Sponsored by the New America Foundation, the Religious Center Initiative is dedicated to understanding how religious heritage and organizations impact American civic life. It seeks to examine how peoples from varying religious backgrounds across the world can overcome their differences in the interest of pursuing the common dream of safety and prosperity. The Initiative regularly publishes commentary and op-eds on relevant issues at home and abroad, and convenes periodic speaking events at...

Sponsored by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life in conjunction with the Templeton Foundation, the Global Religious Futures Project studies the shifting global religious landscape and the collateral effects of those shifts on society at large. Its reports cover topics ranging from religious shifts affecting American politics to global conflicts involving tensions between Christians and Muslims and the suppression of free religious exercise in different nations across the...

Sponsored by Harvard University's Pluralism Project, the Civic Initiative research project focuses on the dynamics of social interaction among the American public in the context of their common identity as citizens of the same republic, rather than their varying and disparate cultural, ethnic, and ideological backgrounds. Among its foci, the Initiative works to measure the constant changes in the shape of "the public square" as a result of shifting demographic trends and to revise long-held...