About UsResearch Funding

Introduction and Background

The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love is devoted to the scientific understanding of other-regarding love in all its manifestations from compassion and kindness to altruism and volunteerism. It seeks to encourage, support, and disseminate high-level scientific research on unlimited love so that we might better understand our human capacities and potential. The Institute also fosters dialogue among researchers, educators, scholars in the humanities, theologians, exemplary practitioners, and the professions in a way that enhances our common understanding based on significant scientific findings.

The following is a broad definition of unlimited love: The essence of love is to affectively affirm as well as to unselfishly delight in the well-being of others, and to engage in acts of care and service on their behalf; unlimited love extends this love to all others without exception in a manner that is enduring and constant. Widely considered the highest form of virtue, unlimited love is often deemed a creative presence underlying all of reality. Such love acknowledges for all humanity the absolutely full significance that, because of egoism, hatred, greed, and group conflict we otherwise acknowledge only for ourselves or for those closest to us.

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Request for Proposal:

Introduction and Background
Mechanism of Support
Eligibility and Criteria

Program Areas:

  1. Human Development
  2. Public Health and Medicine
  3. Mechanisms by which Altruistic Love Affects Health
  4. Other Regarding Virtues
  5. Evolutionary Perspectives
  6. Sociological Studies of Faith Based Communities

Application Procedures

Rigorous scientific methods in numerous disciplines ranging from neuroscience to psychology are typically applied to the analysis of negative behaviors and psychological conditions. These methods, however, can and should be equally applied to the creative capacities for love, compassion, and altruism. (See S.G. Post, L.G. Underwood, J.P. Schloss, W.B. Hurlbut, eds., Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, & Religion in Dialogue. Oxford University Press, 2002 [www.amazon.com]; see also Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation, reprinted from the 1954 original with a "Foreword" by Stephen G. Post. Templeton Foundation Press, 2002 [www.templetonpress.org])

Unlimited Love is a principle affirmed universally by great traditions and leaders: "We can do no great things - only small things with great love" (Mother Teresa); "Kind speech and forgiveness is better than alms followed by injury" (Qur'an); "You shall love the alien as yourself" (Leviticus); "Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it" (Dr. Karl Menninger); "God is love" (I John); "Sooner or later, all the peoples of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love" (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

 

GOALS
To better understand the human potential for loving and other-regarding emotion and behavior
through studies from all scientific disciplines, including human development, epidemiology and health care, neurobiology and neuroscience, positive psychology, sociology, and evolutionary biology, as well as anthropology, political science, economics, and education.
To better understand how the expression of unlimited love in society might be fostered, including attention to the roles of education, media, and spiritual-religious beliefs and practices.
To promote widespread dialogue on the empirical, theoretical, practical, and socially beneficial dimensions of exemplary lives of service and love.
   
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