Enhancing Life Project

**The Enhancing Life Project** The University of Chicago, in collaboration with Ruhr-University Bochum / Germany, has launched a three-year project on “Enhancing Life,” supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. ***The Enhancing Life Project*** explores an essential aspiration of human beings that moves persons and communities into the future. Given the profound expansion of human power through technology as well as advances in genetics, ecology, and other fields, the vulnerability and endangerment as well as the enhancement of life are dominant themes in the global age. ***The Enhancing Life Project*** aims to explore this rich but widely unexamined dimension of human aspiration and social life, and increase knowledge so that life might be enriched. ***The Project*** supports 35 research projects. The Scholars of ***The Enhancing Life Project*** come from diverse academic backgrounds—Christian theology, religious studies (including Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian thought), anthropology, business, communications, history, law, media studies, medicine, philosophy, political science, social work, and sociology—and from different countries and cultural contexts, including Germany, Iraq, Israel, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the USA. See our [People](http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/people) page for more details. ***The Project*** realizes the important objective of collaborative research by means of three required scholarly seminars which innovatively link two paradigms of scholarly work: 1) the seminars allow for in-depth exchange and collaboration by means of multiyear projects (along the lines of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University), and 2) the seminars foster the intellectual focus of a shared concern (similar to single theme conferences). In order to set the context for thinking about enhancing life from multiple perspectives, three unique locations were chosen to host the seminars.