With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation approaching in 2017, Gordon College has been awarded a $75,000 grant for a project that will include hosting an international conference on the impact of Protestantism and its historical significance. Planned for the fall of 2013, the conference will “allow us to explore its trajectories of influence and their relationship to forces of social innovation, political development, and religious change in the modern West and across the globe,” according to Thomas Albert Howard, director of the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College and one of the project’s directors. The grant will come from the John Templeton Foundation’s Religion and Innovation in Human Affairs Program, administered by The Historical Society, which is based at Boston University.