The winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize has been announced. The prize:

How might humankind’s spiritual information and advancement increase by
more than a hundredfold? This is the challenge presented by the
Templeton Prize. Just as knowledge in science, medicine, cosmology and
other disciplines has grown exponentially during the past century, the
Templeton Prize honors and encourages the many entrepreneurs trying
various ways for discoveries and breakthroughs to expand human
perceptions of divinity and to help in the acceleration of divine
creativity.

Past winners have included Michael Novak, Charles Colson, Stanley Jaki, Billy Graham, Chiara Lubich (Focolare Movement), Cicely Saunders (hospice movement), Brother Roger (Taize), Mother Teresa, nad various scientists, including John Polkinghorne. This year’s awardee is Canadian (and Catholic) philosopher Charles Taylor, who teaches at Northwestern. From the Catholic Register:

“A blindness to the spiritual dimension of human life makes us
incapable of exploring issues which are vital to our lives,” said the law and
philosophy professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, Ill., on winning the
prize. The announcement on Taylor being named to receive the award was made
March 14.

Taylor will formally receive the prize from Prince Philip, duke of
Edinburgh, at Buckingham Palace in London on May 2.

Taylor’s career of dissent from post-Enlightenment, secular
thinking began in the 1950s while at Oxford studying under philosopher Isaac
Berlin. His first attack on secular rationalism was a doctoral thesis which
critiqued psychological behaviorism, published as The Explanation of
Behaviour in 1964.

snip

In the 1999 book A Catholic Modernity?, based on 1997
Marianist Lectures delivered in Dayton, Ohio, Taylor declared that the Catholic
Church could find its place within the modern world by seeing Western modernity
as one among the many civilizations in which Christianity has been preached and
practiced.

He warned against a total identification of Catholicism with
European civilization because it would blunt the Christian message. On the other
hand, rejecting modernity as the enemy of the Christian faith similarly narrows
the possibilities for the Christian message.

“There can never be a total fusion of the faith and any particular
society, and the attempt to achieve it is dangerous for the faith,” Taylor
wrote.