Culp awarded Enhancing Life Project grant
Dean Kris Culp has been named one of 35 international scholars in the Enhancing Life Project, an interdisciplinary research project funded by the John Templeton Foundation at the University of Chicago and in collaboration with the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The Project “explores an essential aspiration of human beings that moves persons and communities into the future. Given the profound expansion of human power through technology as well as advances in genetics, ecology, and other fields, the vulnerability and endangerment as well as the enhancement of life are dominant themes in the global age.”
Her research proposal is entitled “Glorious Life?” Her research will examine "glory" as a potential theological resources for thinking about the enhancement of vulnerable life. She plans to engage historical-theological debates about the glory of made things, such as architecture, and develop interdisciplinary reference points, especially the paintings of Mark Rothko, to offer a contemporary construal of glory.
The Enhancing Life Project began July 1, 2015, and continues through August 31, 2017. It includes a two-week summer seminar for each of the next three years to foster collaboration as well as to support individual research and writing. This year's seminar was held July 26 - August 9 at the Banff Center in the Canadian Rockies.