About

Jonathan VanAntwerpen is Program Director for Religion and Theology at the Henry Luce Foundation. Building on the efforts of the Luce Foundation’s longstanding Theology Program, and on the work of the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, the recently re-envisioned Religion and Theology Program aims to foster fresh thinking about religion across multiple social and cultural contexts, to expand and diversify critical intellectual engagement with religion in the United States and beyond, and to promote creative public-facing scholarship. The program’s current initiatives include an RFP seeking to advance public knowledge on the topic of race, justice, and religion in America.

Prior to joining the Luce Foundation in 2014, Jonathan served for a decade on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). At the SSRC, he established a new program on religion and public life, launched a suite of experimental digital publishing platforms, served as acting director of communications, worked to incubate a new initiative on knowledge and culture in a digital age, and organized and convened a wide range of academic and public events.

The founding director of the SSRC’s Religion and the Public Sphere Program, Jonathan created and led a series of projects funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation. A 2005 grant in support of his work at the SSRC was one of four inaugural grants approved in conjunction with the launch of the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

Jonathan is a former visiting scholar at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and a former senior advisor to Contending Modernities, an interdisciplinary initiative based at the University of Notre Dame that is devoted to generating new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways that religious and secular forces interact in the modern world.