Santa Clara University

Philip Boo Riley
Religious Studies Department
University Research Grant
January 7, 2006

This research project’s overall goal is to study the impact of the region’s growing cultural and religious diversity on the nature of religious education in the faith-based high schools in Silicon Valley. Faith-based secondary education is itself in transition—where such schools were in the last century predominantly Roman Catholic with smaller numbers of Protestant and Jewish institutions, we now find that “conservative Christian schools” as a percentage of total private K-12 schools has increased by half, whereas the relative percentage of Catholic schools has declined. (National Center for Educational Statistics).

Our interest is to investigate how religious diversity plays out in the varied secondary education landscape of the bay area. Among our questions are, What varieties of religiously based schools do we have in the Valley? What is the nature of the student population in these schools, particularly in terms of religious affiliation? How do these various schools create frameworks for the religiously-grounded education for their students? How is religious diversity—both among the student bodies but of the region, nation, and world as well represented in the curriculum and extra-curricular programs?

The project ad currently envisioned has three phases; we are seeking funding for the first.

1. documentation, development of the research questions, and six school visits (September 2005-August 2006). Like other LRP documentation efforts, our first step is to identify and obtain base line (location, size, history, denominational ties) information on faith-based high schools in the region.
2. expansion to include additional study sites and publication (September 2006-March 2007)
3. expansion to survey and interview students (March 2007-December 2007)
   

I began working on the Local Religion Project in January 2003, in the middle of a sabbatical leave. I have sharpened its focus at the theoretical level along two lines: LRP concentrates on the intersection of religion with two distinctive dynamics of the Silicon Valley region—immigration and civic engagement—and am developing long term writing projects to ground this perspective in current research literature, and to propose ways other figures (Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Wilfred Cantwell Smith) enrich the question. My proposal to present (with undergraduate students) on LRP at the American Academy of Religion Western Region meeting in March of 2004 has been accepted and I am exploring venues to publish that paper. A related research project, analyzing how the study of religion is institutionalized in autonomous research centers like those mentioned above is planned for next summer.

RSOC 009, Ways of Understanding Religion, is the primary locus for this project. Tentative plans for the 2004-2005 academic year include an advanced level religious studies seminar using LRP for more in depth work with communities as well as exploring its theoretical underpinnings.

• Click to view the full proposal as a PDF.