This web site seeks to assist leaders and participants in Christian communities, scholars and other interested publics in better understanding the impact, trends and trajectories of Christianity in American society. By providing both information and reflection on selected projects funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc., it offers a unique vantage point for discerning the character and contributions of this tradition within American religion and culture.

Please note: The database of projects at this site is not intended to be comprehensive. It does not now nor will it ever include every project that the Lilly Endowment has funded in the field of religion. Instead, selected groups of projects are described here that are deemed of particular current interest or value to religious leaders and scholars. In certain cases, two or more grants given to the same institution and directed by the same individual(s) are listed here as a single project.

This site is also a work in progress. Its database contains only a small fraction of the projects that the Lilly Endowment Inc. intends eventually to place on the site. Additional clusters of projects and products as well as more essays, interviews, study guides and issues of the newsletters, Initiative in Religion and InSites into American Religion will be included as they become available.

This web site is the successor to a web-based pilot project. That pilot grew out of the imagination of the Religion Division staff at the Lilly Endowment Inc. who were eager to employ electronic media as a vehicle for disseminating the rich findings of Lilly-funded projects. Craig Dykstra, Jeanne Knoerle and Kathleen Cahalan provided continuing oversight and leadership in the development of the project.

As a way to begin the effort, the Lilly Endowment asked Auburn Theological Seminary to explore new ways of making the results of Lilly-funded projects in religion more widely available. Auburn developed a prototype electronic publication that in turn led to the creation of a pilot database. This database was eventually mounted on the web and evaluated by a variety of individuals from the church community, the academy and the library world. The encouragement and recommendations for improvement from those evaluations provided direction for reshaping the database into a more extensive web site.

Milton J Coalter, the library director at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, redeveloped the site into its current shape with the assistance of John R. Wimmer, program officer in the Lilly Endowment's Religion division, and technical consultants from Quilogy, Inc.

Several researchers under the direction of several database development managers developed the project and product records in this site’s database. The initials of the author for each grant and product record may be found at the end of each long abstract.

• R. Scott Appleby was associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and directed the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. He was also the author of Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism and co-editor with Mary Jo Weaver of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America.
• Kenneth Arnold was project coordinator for the original pilot database. He had served as director of Rutgers University Press from 1982 to 1994 and was an independent consultant and editor of the journal Cross Currents.
• Mark Chaves was visiting associate professor in the department of sociology, University of Illinois, Chicago. He had published Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations and co-edited with Sharon L. Miller, Financing American Religion.
• Kathleen Mahoney was assistant professor of education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Her research interests and publications are in the field of religion and higher education.
• Shailesh Mark is a graduate student at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY. His research interests include Trinitarian theology, critical theory, and issues of cultural critique. He is simultaneously working on a graduate degree in information technology.