Messiah Homepage News Archive

Messiah professors Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen have been recognized with the prestigious Lilly Fellows Program Book Award for their book, “The American University in a Postsecular Age.” According to award’s criteria, “The biennial Lilly Fellows Program Book Award honors an original and imaginative work from any academic discipline that best exemplifies the central ideas and principles animating the Lilly Fellows Program. These include faith and learning in the Christian intellectual tradition, the vocation of teaching and scholarship, and the history, theory or practice of the university as the site of religious inquiry and culture.”

Douglas Jacobsen, professor of church history and theology, and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, professor of psychology, were confirmed as the winners of the 2009 award during the first week in October. Their book, “The American University in a Postsecular Age” (Oxford University Press, 2008), offers a “groundbreaking set of essays” that explore the implications of religion as a “pervasive and creative force” in American higher education and its influence on teaching and research in the broader academy. The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, based at Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, seeks to “strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of higher learning for the 21st century.”