Robert Wood Lynn, leader in religion scholarship, dies at age 93
In 15 years at the Lilly Endowment, he went beyond merely giving grants, fostering study of core issues in American religious life.
Robert Wood Lynn, an influential Christian educator who served as senior vice president for religion for the Lilly Endowment, died in Scarborough, Maine, on October 7 at age 93.
In a 1989 article in Newsweek on the occasion of Lynn’s retirement from Lilly, Kenneth L. Woodward described how Lynn had “fostered a remarkable renaissance in religious scholarship in the United States and established the main lines of religious inquiry well into the 21st century.”
Through his role at Lilly beginning in 1974, Lynn distributed $100 million in hundreds of grants for research into theological education, church-state relations, and the challenges facing Christian denominations and congregational leaderships.
