wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Presbyterian Wins Templeton Prize

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Note #7703 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Presbyterian Wins Templeton Prize
GA03010

Presbyterian Wins Templeton Prize

by Vicki Fogel Mykles

DENVER, May 25  Holmes Rolston III, a third-generation Presbyterian minister
and a professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, is the winner of
the Templeton Prize for 2003.  He will participate in the Sunday morning
service.

	The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion is awarded annually for
advances in the understanding of spiritual issues. The prize, created in 1972
by Sir John Templeton, carries a cash award of $1.2 million and is the
worlds largest monetary award to an individual. It is philosophys
equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

	Rolston, known as the father of environmental ethics, is one of the
worlds leading advocates of protecting the Earths biodiversity and ecology.
He has argued for the intrinsic value of creation, including the ongoing
evolutionary genesis in the natural world. Rolston is at the forefront of
those exploring the boundaries between religion and biology.

	Rolston, a co-founder in 1979 of the journal Environmental Ethics,
has written the groundbreaking books Science and Religion: A Critical Study,
Environmental Ethics, and Genes, Genesis and God. He also delivered the
world-famous Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in
1997.

	Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, presented the prize to Roslton
at Buckingham Palace on May 7. Within hours, Rolston had donated his cash
prize to his alma mater, Davidson College, to endow a chair in science and
religion. 

	Half a century ago, my professors there gave me a head start on
combining science and Christian faith with intellectual integrity, and I hope
young minds a half-century hence can still have the same opportunity, he
said.

	During his Templeton news conference, Rolston cast the Earths
environmental needs in terms of justice. 

	Our planetary crisis is one of spiritual information  not so much
sustainable development, certainly not escalating consumption, but using the
Earth with justice and charity, he said. Science cannot take us there;
religion, perhaps, can. After we learn altruism for each other, we need to
become altruists toward our fellow creatures. We must encounter nature with
grace, with an Earth ethics, because our ultimate environment is God, in whom
we live, move, and have our being.

	Rolston and his wife, Jane, a Christian educator, live in Fort
Collins, CO.

Additional information for this story provided by the Fort Collins
Coloradoan, templetonprize.org, and davidson.edu.

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