The Bishopsdown Trust - Michael Bourdeaux and the Templeton prize

Michael Bourdeaux and the Templeton prize

Michael Bourdeaux was instructed to study Russian during his National Service; he later spent a formative year, 1959-60, as a British Council student in the Soviet Union, just at a time when the active persecution of Christian believers had been renewed. He went on to become ordained and later, in 1964, he visited Russia in search of evidence of that persecution. " .. at the site of a recently destroyed church in Moscow, he fell in with three elderly women believers, babushki. These women proved to be the authors of an appeal describing the torture and use drugs and imprisonment in mental institutions to break members of the church" in the Soviet Union. Learning of Michael's interest they spoke “Be our voice and speak for us. ”With this call, the course of Bourdeaux’s subsequent life was set." (Richard Chartres reviewing Michael's autobiography in the Church Times, June 2020)

The Templeton Prize

In 1984 Canon Dr Michael Bourdeaux was awarded the Templeton Prize for ‘Progress in Religion’. He donated the prize money to charity, establishing the Bishopsdown Trust. Keston College (which later became Keston Institute) was one of the beneficiaries of the Trust. Keston Institute was the ‘voice of the voiceless’ and regularly reported on the situation of persecuted believers in the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe. It built up an archive of documentation from all the countries it studied. The Institute’s archive and library are now located at Baylor University, Texas and its work continues there and in Russia. (Keston.org.uk)

According to www.templetonprize.org/

"The Templeton Prize honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify "entrepreneurs of the spirit"—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine."
"Men and women of any creed, profession, or national origin may be nominated for the Templeton Prize. The distinguished roster of previous winners includes representatives of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but also others as well. The Prize has been awarded to scientists, philosophers, theologians, members of the clergy, philanthropists, writers, and reformers, for work that has ranged from the creation of new religious orders and social-spiritual movements to human sciences scholarship, to research about the fundamental questions of existence, purpose and the origins of the universe."

The citation on the Templeton Prize website for Michael Bourdeaux states:

Michael Bourdeaux, founder of Keston College in England, worked to examine and explain the systematic destruction of religion in Iron Curtain nations during the Cold War and to defend the rights of faiths in these countries to worship as they chose. When the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc regimes collapsed, Bourdeaux’s efforts for universal religious freedom were widely embraced.

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