A $2.6 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (CRRUCS) will support research activities, fellows programs, curricular offerings, and public lectures. The Center, founded in 2000, has gained recognition and relevance as the federal government highlights the efforts of faith-based organizations in helping confront social problems.

Byron Johnson

Since the beginning of recorded time, religion has been a powerful force in the lives of individuals and societies around the world. At Penn, the Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the School of Arts and Sciences is dedicated to finding out more about the role of religion in contemporary urban America. Does religion matter? With the generous backing of The Pew Charitable Trusts, CRRUCS Director Byron Johnson is optimistic about finding out.

Certainly Dr. Johnson's credentials inspire confidence. Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program and director of the Office for the Study and Prevention of Domestic Violence at Penn, he is also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior fellow at the National Institute for Healthcare Research. In keeping with the Center's mission, Dr. Johnson's own research has focused on quantifying the effectiveness of faith-based organizations to confront various social problems. In collaboration with public/private ventures, he and his CRRUCS colleagues are launching a ground-breaking study of faith-based mentoring to what he calls "Philadelphia's most disadvantaged and at-risk population"- the children of prisoners.

How, specifically, do local congregations, grassroots ministries, and other communities of faith matter in the daily lives of disadvantaged urban children, youth, and families? With a view toward answering this and other questions definitively, the Center continues to find ways to identify, gather, measure, and critically examine the necessary scientific data. One thing is certain - nothing is taken on faith at CRRUCS where scholars are doing something that has not been done before - bringing an academic, non-partisan, and non-denominational approach to finding out "what's true" and "what works." Do they come to this work with any preconceptions? "The best way to put it," says Byron Johnson, "is that we are faith-friendly and fact-based. In keeping with Penn's history and mission, we are obsessively empirical."

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