DeBoer Earns National Prize for Book

The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts presented Lisa DeBoer, professor of art history at Westmont, the 2016 Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Non-Fiction for her book, "The Visual Arts and the Worshiping Church," at its 26th annual National Conference on Oct. 14 at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. DeBoer’s book explores a neglected but crucial element of the "art and worship" conversation: the sociological elements of our churches and our art world. Much of her early work on the project was destroyed in the 2008 Tea Fire.

DeBoer, who has been teaching at Westmont since 1999, graduated from Calvin College, earned a Master of Arts and a doctorate from the University of Michigan. She has received numerous scholarships, awards and fellowships, including a Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst Scholarship from the Federal Republic of Germany, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, a Fulbright Fellowship for study at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie in The Hague, a Lilly Fellows Program Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and Westmont’s Adaline Bare Teacher of the Year Award for Humanities in 2003 and 2009.

Founded in 1991, the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts seeks to strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of higher learning.

The Arlin G. Meyer Prize is awarded biennially to a full-time faculty member from a college or university in the Lilly Fellows Program National Network whose work exemplifies the practice of the Christian scholarly vocation in relation to work in one of the following fields: imaginative writing, visual art, musical performance, performing arts, and non-fiction.