Community of Scholars
Duke’s Community of Scholars (COS) represents a multi-disciplinary team of senior Spirituality, Theology and Health (STH) leaders from Duke, University of North Carolina, and other universities in the U.S. and abroad. This community serves as the leadership core whose overall mission is to move the field of STH into a new era of significance, visibility, and impact. This leadership core seeks to include scholars representing the major branches of Christianity and world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. The purpose of this community is to accomplish the following goals:
- Create and sustain a trans-disciplinary community to stimulate creativity, research, and scholarship in the area of spirituality, theology and health.
- Develop collaborative, multi-center research proposals on STH for submission to private foundations, the National Institutes of Health, and other funding organizations or individuals.
- Mentor and support young investigators in STH by providing critique of and assistance with grant writing, including project design and analysis.
- Provide consultation on STH to government, private health care organizations, business, and religious organizations.
- Provide a Speaker’s Bureau of experts on STH who can give presentations to outside organizations on the topic.
- Produce joint-authored opinion pieces, consensus reports, and other articles for peer-reviewed publication.
- Participate in fund raising and acquiring resources to maintain COS, the membership society in STH, and the yearly national/international conferences.
- Review STH research proposals for private foundations, the National Institutes of Health, and other organizations that fund this type of research.
- Provide recommendations to government and private foundations on proposal revision when they have identified promising but inadequately formed STH grants in their area of interest.
