Funding Evangelical Scholarship

Emergesque just turned me on to a great arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cals in acad­e­mia.

The arti­cles focus­es on the neces­si­ty of large foun­da­tions (espe­cial­ly the Lil­ly Endow­ment and the Pew Char­i­ta­ble Trusts) to pro­vide fund­ing for evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars (things like research and sab­bat­i­cals cost mon­ey!)

Some­thing I find pret­ty inter­est­ing: the evan­gel­i­cal schol­ars seem to be good invest­ments: “As mea­sured by schol­ar­ly pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, foun­da­tions sup­port­ing evan­gel­i­cal schol­ar­ship have received an unusu­al­ly high return on their invest­ment. A study by the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties found that 45 per­cent of their grant recip­i­ents had pub­lished books with­in six years of receiv­ing their grants. By con­trast, a study of schol­ars receiv­ing grants from the Pew Evan­gel­i­cal Schol­ars Pro­gram found that 90 per­cent had fin­ished their books with­in six years.”

There’s a relat­ed arti­cle from 2000 in the The Atlantic Month­ly