2016 Templeton Prize Winner to be Announced on March 2
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The winner of the 2016 Templeton Prize will be announced on Wednesday, March 2 at 5:30 am EST at a news conference in London, which will be webcast live at www.templetonprize.org.
The winner of the 2016 Templeton Prize will be announced on Wednesday, March 2 at 5:30 am EST at a news conference in London, which will be webcast live at www.templetonprize.org.
The new streamlined nomination form for 2017 Templeton Prize candidates is now open and available online on the Prize website, www.templetonprize.org. The form has been updated to be more comprehensive and user-friendly.
Bernard d’Espagnat, physicist, philosopher of science, and 2009 Templeton Prize Laureate, passed away on Saturday, August 1, at the age of 93. D’Espagnat played a key role during a revolutionary period of exploration and development in quantum mechanics in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically on experiments testing the “Bell’s inequalities” theorem.
A ceremony to honor the 2015 Templeton Prize Laureate, Jean Vanier, was held on May 18 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Vanier received the award from Heather Templeton Dill and Jennifer Templeton Simpson, daughters of the late Dr. John M. Templeton Jr., President and Chairman of the John Templeton Foundation.
L’Arche communities, founded by the 2015 Templeton Prize Laureate Jean Vanier, have become the focus of a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation to study exemplars of the virtues of care and compassion. “Love, Compassion, and Care: Virtue Science and Exemplarity in Real Life and in the Laboratory” is a joint project between The Travis Research Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Graduate School of Psychology and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
In 2007, the John Templeton Foundation’s Humble Approach Initiative held a symposium to address a question posed by L’Arche’s visionary founding leader and 2015 Templeton Prize laureate, Jean Vanier: “What have people with disabilities taught me?” The answers are presented in a book, The Paradox of Disability: Responses to Jean Vanier and L’Arche Communities from Theology and the Sciences.
The 2015 Templeton Prize has been awarded to Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, a revolutionary network of communities in which people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers. Vanier embodies the three key qualities celebrated by the award, explained Jennifer Simpson, the granddaughter of Sir John Templeton, when the announcement was made at the British Academy in London on March 11: he is an entrepreneur of the spirit whose accomplishments include insight, discovery, and practical works.
Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate best known for his work on the invention of the laser, died on January 27, 2015 at the age of 99. “Wonderful things in both science and religion come from our efforts based on observations, thoughtful assumptions, faith, and logic,” he explained when he received the Templeton Prize in 2005 for his contribution in the field of science and religion. “I feel very humble at being thought to have contributed to such critically important fields as spirituality and the purpose of life.”
Monsignor Professor Tomáš Halík, the winner of the 2014 Templeton Prize and the 44th laureate, received his award during a ceremony in St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on May 14, 2014. The Czech priest and philosopher, who advanced religious and cultural freedoms after the Soviet invasion of his country, was awarded a check valued at £1.1 million (about $1.8 million or €1.3 million).
The 2014 Templeton Prize has been awarded to Msgr. Prof. Tomáš Halík, a Czech priest and philosopher who risked imprisonment for advancing religious and cultural freedoms after the Soviet occupation of his country. He has since become a leading international advocate for dialogue among different faiths and non-believers, arguing that today the key difference is not between theists and atheists, but between “dwellers” and “seekers.”