Yoko Ono took to her Twitter to ask people to vote for a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding—currently on track to make the final round of the Ideas for Change in America competition run by Change.org. (Last year, “Appoint a Secretary of Peace in a Department of Peace” was voted one of the top 10 ideas.)
The first round of voting ends Thursday at 5 p.m., and there are lots of other interesting ideas, so go to the Web site and vote for your favorites!

The Web site Patheos has decided to hold a “Faith on Campus” video contest, inviting students older than 18 to share their faith (or lack thereof) in a short video that’s no longer than five minutes.
The grand-prize winner will get 2,500 dollars, and 1,000 dollars will be awarded to the best video on each of these topics:

• Why I am a [fill in your faith]
• How I live my beliefs on campus
• Rituals and practices of my faith

Entries will be posted as they come in, and you can go to the site and vote for your favorites. The 20 videos that get the highest number of votes will enter the final round, where a panel of official judges, including Science & Religion Today contributors Craig Detweiler and Eboo Patel, will pick the winners. Another 1,000 dollars will be given to the video the public likes best.
The deadline for submission is April 15.

The International Society for Science & Religion is holding an essay contest for students and young academics (without tenure) in honor of Sir John Polkinghorne’s 80th birthday.
The essays (which can be no more than 10,000 words) should explore a topic related to one of the major themes of Polkinghorne’s work on the relationship between science and theology—like chaos theory, natural theology, or epistemology—and highlight what makes Polkinghorne’s work unique or relevant.
Essays will be judged by experts in science and religion, and the first-place winner will earn 10,000 pounds and the chance to present the essay at the God and Physics conference in July.
The submission deadline is March 31.

The Chinese Spirituality and Society Program at Purdue University is offering 500,000 dollars in grants to researchers who want to study the role of religion in China. According to recent reports, religion is exploding in the once-atheist country (Field Notes, October 13, 2009), where there are now five state-approved faiths: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism. As sociologist Fenggang Yang, who developed the new program, explains:

The transition toward a market economy, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization are leading to religious changes in China. On the other hand, the religious changes are having profound impacts on Chinese culture, economy, politics, and international relations. The goal is for the program to generate new findings about religion in China so people around the world can better understand how religion affects individuals, families, communities, businesses, and civil society in the country with the world’s largest population.

The program plans to award two or three large grants to research centers and about 10 smaller grants to individual projects. The first application deadline is December 15.