The John Templeton Foundation granted the Biola University with almost $4,000,000 to further the study of Gratitude to God. The Gratitude to God project intents to employ conceptual and empirical methods to investigate the nature of Gratitude to God and to grasp its differences and relations compared to person-to-person gratitude, and more broadly, to illuminate the nature of a fundamental affective process within the psychology of religion. Dr. Lilian Jans-Beken submitted a letter of intent to this project in collaboration with dr. Paul T.P. Wong, and she received word that she is invited to submit a full proposal to the project.
The research question that is presented in the proposal Mature gratitude based on the transformation of suffering is threefold. First, with the proposed study we want to look further into two dimensions – horizontal and vertical – of mature gratitude. We propose that the vertical dimension includes Gratitude to God. Second, we want to look into the proximal virtues of mature gratitude to determine other virtues important to mature gratitude to cultivate. Third, we want to conduct an experiment to see whether a writing intervention can contribute to cultivating mature gratitude.
We congratulate dr. Lilian Jans-Beken with this succes and wish her all the best with the next submission!
