When it comes to academic scholarship, blue sky and dollars are often the only limits on research.
But Luis Lugo discovered another obstacle early in his scholarly career.
All it took was for the doctoral candidate in political science to suggest a project that would delve deeply into religion.
The response, at best, was cool. "In my own discipline, political science, the Emily Post rule applied," recalls Dr. Lugo, who took his PhD at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. "Religion was simply not something one discussed in polite company."
Lugo, who persevered and went on to examine religion's impact on early United States foreign policy, chuckles about the incident. But that's not the only thing that makes him smile. In the years since he started his studies, US higher education has done a sharp about-face. American scholarship, Lugo says, has gotten religion.
The ivory tower has gone from keeping a rigid distance between religion and social-science scholarship to a still-modest, but growing, embrace of it, says Lugo, director of the religion program at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia.
He's not alone in his assessment of the shift. "Since the early 1990s, there has been a broad increase in the amount of interest in religion in the academy as a research topic," says Kathleen Mahoney, coauthor of a forthcoming book on religion's role within higher education. "We are seeing religion-and-fill-in-the-blank research: religion and economics, religion and political science, religion and history."
For most of the 20th century, scholarship and religion were at opposite poles when it came to research - with religion confined to its own department. Religion's ingrained values were seen as antithetical to a search for answers based on a scientific line of reasoning.
Now, however, a broader range of academics are beginning to see the "religion factor" as a key to understanding historical, political, social, and even economic forces.
Mahoney, Lugo, and others note that some disciplines have warmed to religion research, while others remain in the deep freeze.
Growing numbers of political scientists and historians have also found religion to be a critical element in their work.
"I think we [in the academy] are finally figuring out that the importance of religion is self-evident," says Ted Jelen, a political scientist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "Social scientists have been constantly predicting the secularization of the world. That simply has not happened. Religion is remarkably resilient."