About the Endowment

The Taylor and Tamara Woods Humanities and Belief Endowment was created for the purpose of supporting the College of Humanities in its efforts to promote a humanities education that is both intellectually enlarging and spiritually strengthening. It provides valuable and needed resources to assist undergraduate students, aspiring academics in graduate programs, and practicing LDS scholars in the humanities at BYU in their quest to live, think, and publish as believing thinkers and thinking believers.

With immense gratitude and a deep desire to honor the generosity and vision of our donors, the College of Humanities developed the Humanities and Belief Summer Workshop. LDS graduate students in the humanities are brought to BYU for a seminar of intensive readings, discussion, and mentoring with BYU faculty and invited guests from other universities. We investigate scholarship that addresses the challenges of belief in our time and provides pathways through, rather than around, those challenges. The goal is to shore up faith, strengthen connection to a community of believing humanists and role models, and study theories, methodologies, and ideas that are often neglected in graduate programs but that offer powerful tools for the believing humanist.

In addition, this endowment is used to improve pedagogical approaches as well as scholarly endeavors so that all our faculty and students are in a better position to contribute and shape respective fields as scholars of faith. As we research and understand contemporary paradigms of study in the humanities we seek to identify and expand the common ground between the humanities and belief.