october 2003 planning meeting

Overview
Research Questions
Meeting Agenda
Meeting Participants

Overview

This meeting, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, explored how best to engage leading economists and other social scientists in the sustained study of spiritual capital. The Templeton Foundation’s long-term aim is not only to support empirically rigorous research but also to seed a new field with growing philanthropic research support.

This meeting was designed to bring greater definitional clarity on what constitutes spiritual capital, to help form a network of interested scholars and to identify concrete steps to advance research on spiritual capital, especially among economists.

The format emphasized the frank exchange of ideas rather than formal paper presentations. To foster discussion, short “think pieces” were commissioned from meeting participants.The papers identified promising areas for spiritual capital research in different fields. We have made several of these papers available, including the beginnings of a literature review. The meeting also addressed strategic questions of how to build a spiritual capital field, such as conferences, publications (edited journal), fellowships, and other components of a major research initiative.

Research Questions

Some research questions that this initiative might address include:

• What is spiritual capital? What is a spiritual entrepreneur?


• What steps will generate research in spiritual capital, steps involving a deep, dynamic and necessarily difficult (debate welcoming) interdisciplinary effort linking together research in economics, sociology and other social sciences?


• How best can issues of central interest to economists (economic efficiency, entrepreneurism, economic growth) be illuminated by developing a nuanced and rigorous basis for understanding the relationships between religion and aspects of economic performance?


• What issues will be most productive for building the long-term health and vigor of a research arena focused on spiritual capital? Some topics might include: spirituality and health, development, expanding the radius of trust, impact of corruption on development, the role of religious markets, and more.


• What characteristic strengths and weaknesses are brought to the table by forms of formal economic analysis applied to various aspects of religion?


• How can the reductive ‘tyranny of compression’ in economic modeling be suppressed in order to build an open, engagement-with-reality research? The new research must embrace religions’ complex forms, influences and contexts, while connecting with research questions usually raised within the field of economics.

Agenda

Thursday, October 9, 2003

Friday, October 10, 2003

Meeting Participants

ROBERT BARRO, Harvard University

GARY BECKER, University of Chicago

MARK CHAVES, University of Arizona

BARRY CHISWICK, University of Illinois at Chicago

ROGER FINKE, Penn State University

EDWARD GLAESER, Harvard University

PAUL GLEWWE, University of Minnesota

JONATHAN GRUBER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

LAWRENCE HARRISON, Tufts University

ROBERT HEFNER, Boston University

LAWRENCE IANNACCONE, George Mason University

GLENN LOURY, Boston University

LINDA DATCHER LOURY, University of Michigan

THEODORE MALLOCH, The Roosevelt Group

DEIRDRE MCCLOSKEY, University of Illinois at Chicago

ROBERT NELSON, University of Maryland

ROBERT PUTNAM, Harvard University

THOMAS SANDER, Harvard University

CHRISTOPHER WINSHIP, Harvard University

ROBERT WOODBERRY, University of Texas at Austin