Prizing Spirituality: Charles Taylor wins Templeton

Link: Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

NEW YORK, MARCH 14 – Professor Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who for nearly half a century has argued that problems such as violence and bigotry can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions, has won the 2007 Templeton Prize.

The Templeton Prize, valued at 800,000 pounds sterling, more than $1.5 million, was announced today at a news conference at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York by the John Templeton Foundation, which has awarded the prize since 1973.  The Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award given to an individual.

Charles Taylor is engaged in contemporary, important, cross-cultural questions such as "What role does spiritual thinking have in the 21st Century?"  For more than 45 years, Taylor, 75, has argued that wholly depending on secularized viewpoints only leads to fragmented, faulty results.  He has described such an approach as crippling, preventing crucial insights that might help a global community increasingly exposed to clashes of culture, morality, nationalities, and religion.