hi INDiA Copyright 2022-2050
SOUTH BEND, IN — A multi-million dollar donation by a Pakistani-American couple in South Bend, Ind., to the University of Notre Dame will go toward creating an institute dedicated to the study of religions around the world.
Rafat and Zoreen Ansari and their family donated $15 million as a way to create the institute, the university announced March 17.
The institute will be named the Rafat and Zoreen Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion and will be a part of Notre Dame’s new Donald R. Keough School of Global Affairs, the university said.
Through research, teaching, outreach and interaction with religious communities worldwide, the institute will be a center of public deliberation and education about all religions, it added.
“The Ansari Institute intends to change the conversation about religion – not by denying the troubling aspects of religious expression, but by directing attention to the vast good done by religions, and the even greater good they might accomplish in partnership with universities and other public and private institutions,” said R. Scott Appleby, Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School.
The institute will appoint faculty members who study the roles religions play in the public sphere and in crucial sectors such as healthcare, education and the economy.
It will also create fellowships for promising graduate students and organize a series of conferences convening the foremost leaders, practitioners and thinkers engaged in inter-religious and religious-secular dialogue about issues of pressing social concern.
Rafat and Zoreen Ansari moved in 1980 to South Bend, where they raised their three children–Sarah, Adam and Sonya.