Our Mission

Canyon Institute for Advanced Studies is a Christian interdisciplinary research center, bringing together creative minds and resources to:
  • Investigate and research issues emerging from new discoveries and advances - particularly those that redefine the boundaries of our knowledge and of its limits - to better understand their implications for us in the common ground of faith and discipline.
  • Develop insights that lead to a more integrated view and understanding of the world around us, and of our stewardship of its emergent challenges.
  • Disseminate information and perspectives to assist people of faith in the global community in developing sound, coherent, and informed foundations for engaging the exciting opportunities that lie before us.

Advances in science and technology, for all their evident benefit, continue to confront us with increasingly serious and difficult conceptual and moral issues. We are immersed as well in a host of new social and political confrontations, any one of which has the potential for suddenly and profoundly altering the future of our world.

Unprecedented opportunities compel us to push ahead on many fronts into substantially uncharted waters. An unusual measure of careful stewardship and wisdom is requisite as we are forced to revisit the very limits of traditional frameworks of understanding in both faith and discipline.

The voices of opinion are strong, and passions color the landscape. But the need is evident for sound, measured, and constructive engagement of the new and groundbreaking challenges of our time. It is equally clear that this engagement must be coherently informed by every available resource including the fullest accessible extent of both scientific and spiritual domains.

Our work is foundational, recognizing that engaging some of the more difficult questions requires deep and thoughtful examination of the very nature and limits of knowledge and understanding in both discipline and faith.

Our approach is multi-disciplinary, drawing on perspectives from a diversity of academic disciplines to enrich the opportunity for discovery and insight. Our Christian institutional setting gives us a particular sensitivity to the intersection of faith and discipline.

We consciously address two audiences with our work, as we do with this website. Research is our fundamental intellectual engagement with the issues, including the discourse, networking, and professional communication with the community of scholars and researchers. We embrace scientific rigor, while consciously allowing sound philosophical ideas to intersect with emergent scientific understanding in order to make connections between otherwise compartmentalized bodies of knowledge.

Of equal importance in our work is the dissemination of insights and resources for others who desire better understanding of critical information and issues of our time, and how to respond to them thoughtfully and responsibly in the context of faith.

We invite you to get better acquainted with us by further perusing our website, including our projects, research perspectives, organization and relationship with Grand Canyon University, which extends its welcome to you as well. A number of resources are also available which we encourage you to take advantage of.