About the Lilly Fellows Program

The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, established in 1991, addresses two critical problems faced by church-related institutions of higher learning in the United States:

• Many church-related colleges and universities seek to recover or refortify a sense of purpose and identity, but there has been no sustained national conversation expressly designed to renew and deepen a sense of corporate vocation among these institutions.
• Settings for the formation of younger scholars who wish to pursue their vocational commitments at church-related colleges and universities scarcely exist in the United States.

To address these issues, the Lilly Fellows Program created three distinct but integrated programmatic initiatives:

• A national network of church-related institutions of higher learning representing a diversity of denominational traditions, institutional types, and geographical locations, which sustains among them a discussion of Christian understandings of the nature of the academic vocation. In 1995, the Lilly Fellows Program established a National Network Board, which devises and supervises a number of projects including mentoring programs, summer seminars, and a variety of national conferences and workshops.
• Postdoctoral fellowships that offers young scholars in the humanities and the arts a chance to renew and deepen their sense of vocation, and to enrich their postdoctoral intellectual and spiritual life within a Christian community of learning. Postdoctoral Fellows are prepared through a variety of teaching experiences, participation in a weekly colloquium, and regular association with mentors, to seek permanent employment within church-related institutions of higher learning.
• Financial support each year for 15 young scholars of exceptional academic talent who are exploring vocations in church-related higher education. The support lasts during their first three years of graduate school.

These initiatives bring focus, clarity, and energy to a critical aspect of a much larger project: The imaginative reformulation and implementation of an agenda for church-related higher learning for the 21st century.

Learn more at the Lilly Fellows Program website.

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