The Roanoke College Center for Religion and Society, founded in 1982, aims at bringing to bear Christian religious and moral perspectives—particularly in their Lutheran interpretation—on contemporary challenges to church and world. The Center assumes that the most important human decisions, both public and private, are profoundly affected by religious commitments and therefore it seeks to encourage dialogue in various communities based on that assumption. Its purpose is to cross boundaries between religion and society, church and world, sacred and secular.

The Center for Religion and Society contends that serious religious traditions are comprehensive accounts of life and reality. While these accounts definitely apply to the private life, they do not stop there. Such religious accounts also provide understandings and interpretations of the public world and affect individual and corporate action in that world. Serious religion is a person- and institution-forming enterprise, one that vitally concerns the Center.

The Center's Logo helps to express the purposes of the Center. The arrows represent the challenges of God to both religion and society, while the emergent St. Andrew's Cross suggests Christian response to those challenges.