Intersection of science and spirituality is ‘existential necessity,’ Ecumenical Patriarch says in Templeton address
September 26, 2025
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CWN Editor's Note: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who holds a primacy of honor among the Orthodox churches, received the Templeton Prize in New York on September 24.
In his Templeton Prize address (“Where Heaven Meets Earth: A Meditation on Faith, Science, and our Planet”), the Ecumenical Patriarch said that “through the centuries, we have witnessed a tragic alienation—religion withdrawing to its sanctuaries, science retreating to its laboratories, each suspicious of the other’s claims upon truth ... Yet this separation was never meant to be.”
“Let me propose not answers but an appeal—to see the intersection of science and spirituality not as an intellectual exercise but as an existential necessity,” he concluded. “The future of our planet depends on our capacity to bring together the precision of scientific method with the perception of spiritual vision, the urgency of prophetic witness with the patience of contemplative practice.”
Past winners of the Templeton Prize—originally known as the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion—include Mother Teresa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Father Stanley Jaki, and Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.
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