Congratulations to Professor Francisco J. Ayala, the Templeton Prize 2010 Laureate. Ayala is an evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist who has vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion while also calling for mutual respect between the two.
Below Ayala addresses the question: Does scientific knowledge contradict religious belief?
Click here for more information on Ayala as well as the Templeton Prize.
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A news conference will be held in Washington, DC this Thursday, March 25th at 11:00 am EDT, to announce the new 2010 Templeton Prize recipient.
The Templeton Prize each year honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Created by the late global investor and philanthropist Sir John Templeton, the Prize is a cornerstone of the John Templeton Foundation’s international efforts to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life’s biggest questions, ranging from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on love, gratitude, forgiveness, and creativity.
Valued at one million pounds sterling (about $1.51 million or €1.10 million), the Templeton Prize is the world’s largest annual monetary award given to an individual.
The 2010 Prize laureate will attend the news conference and be available for questions via a live webcast at www.templetonprize.org.
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Interested in the Gifford Lectures? Not sure what the Gifford Lectures are?
For over a hundred years the Gifford Lecture series has been one of the foremost lecture series dealing with religion, science and philosophy. In his 1885 will the jurist Adam Lord Gifford, convinced that true, felt knowledge of God when acted upon generated human well-being and progress, bequeathed £80,000 to the four Scottish universities (Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, and St. Andrews) for the establishment of a series of lectures dealing with the topic of natural religion. In dealing with their particular area of interest and expertise, lecturers are to discuss natural theology as a science, that is, “without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.”
Since the first lecture in 1888, Gifford Lecturers have been recognized as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. Among the many exceptional lecturers are Alfred North Whitehead, Etienne Gilson, Werner Heisenberg, Max Mueller, and Iris Murdochand.
To find out more about the Gifford Lectures, please visit www.giffordlectures.org, or better yet, become a fan of the Gifford Lectures on Facebook!
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If you’d like to see what we have in store for our Spring publishing list, you can head over to our website to download our full catalog. We’ve got a handful of great titles coming up that really show the full range of our diverse publishing areas.
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For a period of time, we’ve been experimenting with widgets. Recently, we released our first widget, The Big Question in Science and Religion, on our blog. Today, we’re pleased to announce we have another widget available!
With a simple click of a button, From Galileo to Gell-Mann by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini is now available to preview and browse.
To access the widgets, you can click the above links or click directly on the publication’s cover image below. Again we encourage everyone to copy and paste this wherever they desire. Post it on your blog, tweet it, attach it to emails, you decide!
Enjoy!
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Calling it “an introduction to the intersection of science and religion that is addressed to the thoughtful but nonspecialist reader,” CHOICE, the premier review magazine for academic libraries, examines several of the book’s strengths, noting how even-handed the author is in addressing several different world religions and how thorough she is in exploring new technologies. If you are reading this blog (or any blog, for that matter), chances are that you are fairly technology-savvy, which further means that you might find it quite interesting to think about how things like virtual environments, social networking, gentic engineering, or nanotechnology might carry positive and/or negative implications for religious experience.
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The Global Spiral recently published a very detailed review of Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown’s book, Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion. The book is one of our newer releases in the Templeton Science and Religion series and the entire series has been getting some positive attention lately. From the review:
This book provides an excellent and very accessible overview of the state-of-the-question at the intersection of the cognitive sciences, psychology, and religion….Hence it is without hesitation that I recommend Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion as a wonderful primer that clarifies the Illusions, Delusions, and Realities about Human Nature.
Click here for the full review.
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If you’re going to be attending the annual meeting of The American Academy of Religion meeting next week in Montreal, we’ll see you there! You’ll find us in the exhibit hall at booth 409, where we’ll be taking orders for all of our titles at some of the deepest discounts of the year. Editors will also be on hand if you have any book proposals that you think might be a good fit for our list (you can familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines here). As always, we’re looking forward to touching base with our readers, catching up with some of our authors, and hopefully attending some great sessions.
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Harold Koenig, author of several Templeton Press titles (most recently Medicine, Religion, and Health), was featured in the Irish Times for his work in the field of health and spirituality.
Prof Harold Koenig, professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina, asks “Can a spiritual life help us in the world: implications for mental health”.
He points out that religious belief can be both a hindrance and a help in patients with psychological problems. Those with psychosis may have religious delusions, while rigidly held beliefs can lead to unhealthy guilt in vulnerable people.
But religion can be helpful in assisting people cope with fear, loneliness and social isolation.
A major European study found a direct link between religious attendance and rates of depression.
Also making headlines recently was Everitt L. Worthington (author of The Power of Forgiving, Humility and other works) for his appearance in a magnificent looking new documentary called The Big Question: A Film About Forgiveness.
“Forgiveness seems to be necessary at every level and touch point of human interaction — for individuals, families, communities, at workplaces, in society,” says Everett L. Worthington, Ph.D., who is featured in the film. A leading expert on forgiveness research and a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr. Worthington explains simply, “Everyone benefits from forgiveness”
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Science for Ministry is a new initiative of the John Templeton Foundation that “invites organizations to develop programs that will help ministers and the congregations they serve to move away from simplistic ‘solutions’ to the tensions between science and faith.”
Some of the institutions selected to participate were Asbury Theological Seminary, Fermi Project, Regent College, The Trinity Forum, and more.
According to the Princeton Theological Seminary website, J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, the James I. McCord Professor of Theology and Science at the Princeton Theological Seminary and Editor of the Templeton Science and Religion Series, will serve as codirector of the initiative at Princeton Theological Seminary.
“This initiative,” says van Huyssteen, “is intended to address a common experience of ministers and scientists of faith who struggle to develop a constructive dialogue around issues of theology and science in their ministry contexts. We are seeking to equip leaders in ministry with the knowledge and tools to confidently respond to these fundamental challenges, and to do so in ways that encourage a transformational impact on their church communities.”
Princeton Seminary’s program is designed for 144 participants from 72 Christian faith communities. Each community will send a scientist and a theologian to participate in a five-day introductory program that focuses on the two essential questions shared by theology and science: questions of origins and questions of human nature. Participants will then choose from a series of three-day and one-day events that focus on different facets of these questions, including topics such as evolution in both cosmology and biology, and cognitive science, neuroscience, and the human person. Each pair of scientist and theologian will return to their community equipped to further the dialogue between science and theology.
To view other participants and to review the project overview of each organization with their full proposal, click here.
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