For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about a project to make the study of the philosophy of religion better match the global spectrum of religious approaches.
Religion is a global phenomenon as diverse as the peoples of the world, but the academic study of the philosophy of religion has long skewed toward English-language work rooted in the traditions of Western Christianity. A new project aims to expand and diversify the perspectives of the field. Led by Yujin Nagasawa, a philosopher of religion at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and funded with $2.9 million from the John Templeton Foundation, the effort aims to promote the work of researchers from under-reported regions and to support research in the philosophical issues arising from non-Christian theistic religions including Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shintoism, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism.
The three-year project will focus on philosophical topics regarding the existence of and nature of a deity or deities, the origins and relief of evil and suffering, and questions about death, immortality, and ultimate human destiny. It will support three postdoctoral fellowships, as many as 20 research subgrants, and an equal number of grants for translation of key philosophy of religion papers into (or out of) English-language journals. The project will also support 20 small subrants to help non-native English speakers polish their research for submission to Anglophone scholarly journals, four seminars for early career researchers, three international conferences, and the hiring of a new permanent senior lecturer in philosophy of religion at the University of Birmingham.