EON

New York (EON) – The world’s largest monetary award, the Templeton Prize, went Wednesday to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who for half a century has argued that violence and bigotry can be solved by studying their secular and spiritual dimensions.

Named after world financier John Templeton, the prize valued at 1.5 million dollars, is given each year to those who work “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.”

Taylor, a Catholic in French-speaking Quebec province and a Rhodes Scholar, has been investigating the secular and spiritual to help resolve conflicts in society.

“Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistic, literature and every other facet of humanity and the social sciences,” Templeton said in a ceremony name Taylor for the prize.

Taylor will receive the prize from Prince Philip on May 2 at a private Buckingham Palace ceremony in London.

Taylor said at the event in New York that spiritual aspects should be explored as ways to solve violence, in the same way leaders like Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mahatma Gandhi of India helped transform their countries under colonial occupation.

“We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence, and following the authors (like Mandela and Gandhi), this cannot be a reductive socio-biological one, but must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion,” Taylor said.

Recent winners of the Templeton Prize include Hohn D Barrow, professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, professor Charles Townes of the University of California at Berkeley, and professor George FR Ellis of the University of Cape Town in South Africa.