lthough the West is often perceived as the intellectual hub for the study of science and spirituality, a new $1.2 million program is changing that. The Global Perspectives on Science and Spirituality (GPSS) is a multi-component, award program asking top scholars and scientists to participate in the largest grants competition ever to target Asia and Central/Eastern Europe in the field of science and spirituality. (Click here for a list of winners)

GPSS is building on the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences’ important Science and the Spiritual Quest program, as well as the Metanexus Institute’s Local Societies Initiative, but with the added mission of increasing the global scope of the participants involved. As Pranab Das, GPSS principal investigator explained, “The project’s main objective is to gain insights from regions of the world that have, until now, been largely absent from the science-religion dialogue. From the outset our challenge has not only been to reach out to the rich scholarship of Asia and Eastern/Central Europe but also to gain access to thinkers at a truly advanced level, to have an impact that would resonate through their intellectual communities.”

The program is off to a strong start. After sifting through 160 applications, 18 research projects were chosen from countries as diverse as China, Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia. The GPSS monetary awards ranged from $40,000 to $130,000. “I am firmly convinced that the unique insights from our target regions will add significantly to a field which has primarily grown up in a Western context,” says Das.

As could be expected, the subjects addressed by the winners cover a wide range of intellectual terrain. At the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China, a team is considering “Scientific Approaches to Human Consciousness and the Implications for Taoist Religion”, in India, researchers are investigating “Brain and Being: the Science and Spirituality of Consciousness”, and in Poland, award winners are pursuing a project to examine “Current Controversies about Human Origins”.

The positive response from leading scholars and scientists to the GPSS project was not surprising to Das. “We have encountered growing enthusiasm in the academic community that reflects the longstanding fascination that has always lain close under the surface. The academic community has long been stirred by the obvious power of the science-religion/spirituality conversation. The challenge in the past was a concern that serious scholarship was somewhat less common than more fluffy or frivolous popularizations. Happily, the last 10 years have seen a crystallization of the field into a respectable endeavor championed by some very impressive intellectuals.” GPSS is jointly managed by the Interdisciplinary University of Paris (France) and Elon University (USA).

A series of interdisciplinary workshops gathering the award winners to discuss their research, as well as radio, television and publishing projects, are ways in which the winners are getting their work out to a wider audience. A recent conference in Delhi featured the participation of the Dalai Lama as well as leading Indian intellectuals. There are also plans to present the work they are doing to the Western world in the form of an edited volume and other publishing projects.

Das is careful to point out that GPSS is an intense engagement with some of the world’s leading scholars and not an apologetic project. “It’s not motivated by any reckless desire to demonstrate the failings of science or the limits of spiritual understanding. Rather, it is an interdisciplinary quest to fully grasp the function, overlap and co-information of two central facets of the human search for meaning.”

www.uip.edu/gpss_major