Dr Daniel Weiss (Divinity) and Professor Napoleon Katsos (Linguistics) are celebrating news that their pilot work on God and Human Speech has been rewarded by a multi-year full grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
The full project now has the title, God, Language and Diversity: Spiritual Flourishing in Neurodiverse and Multilingual Communities.
The project is led by Dr Joanna Leidenhag (University of Leeds) and the new grant is worth £1.56 million (supporting the core work and funding researchers in different institutions).
The University of Cambridge will receive £219,000, the bulk of which is intended to fund postdoctoral researchers—a one-year post based in the Faculty of Divinity, and a two-year post in Linguistics. Funds also cover honoraria for research participants, supporting the experimental aspect. Weiss and Katsos also hope to attract additional funding, to enable a Cambridge conference on the topic.
CIP previously assisted Weiss and Katsos to organise a half-day workshop in Cambridge, bringing together researchers and other experts in the field. Here is a report from that event in October 2023:
Event report: God and Human Speech workshop, 8 October 2023
Our workshop stemmed from a Templeton Foundation-funded pilot grant, led by Dr Joanna Leidenhag at the University of Leeds. This work pairs theologians and empirical scientists working in the area of psychology and language.
The Weiss-Katsos project at Cambridge focuses on ways classical rabbinic forms of text-interpretation can be illuminated by comparison to language acquisition in child development and in neurodivergent individuals. We have applied this especially to the rabbinic practice of uncovering multiple ‘creative’ readings of scriptural texts.
The October workshop focused on building conversations across participants from the two broad disciplines, and assessing resonances and points of connection. Attendees included scholars with background in Jewish and in Christian theological and textual interpretation, and scholars with background in experimental linguistics and psychology of language. They ranged from Cambridge undergraduates, to UK academics and post-docs, plus external experts in both of the two fields—Alexander Samely from Manchester (rabbinics) and Ira Noveck from Paris (experimental linguistics).
Discussion was lively and very fruitful, showing concrete paths for future research. It set the stage for carrying out textual studies and empirical experiments as part of the next stage of the Templeton-funded grant.
The workshop was supported by the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum’s Small Grant scheme.