ISSR Annual Book Prize
The ISSR 2026 Book Prize on Science and Religion nomination period is now closed. We thank all who submitted nominations. Only those authors selected for advancement in the prize will be contacted. More information on the Prize can be found below.
General
The International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) is pleased to continue an annual international Book Prize for exceptional texts written in the field of science and religion. This Prize originated from the generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
The intention of the Prize is to understand ‘religion’ broadly and to seek excellence in both content and communication. We will seek to reward books that make a major contribution to the field, especially if they have the potential to take the field into new directions. We expect that three books will be selected each year, with one suitable for a general audience (‘the public’), one for an academic audience, and one for a professional audience (e.g. ministers/pastors, or school teachers).
Each year, there will be three prizes for the winning books presented to the winning authors at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The prizes will be announced publicly and awarded at an ISSR reception at that year’s meeting, and the winners will each receive a £500.00 award (split if two authors).
Eligibility
Books nominated must have a publication date from the past two years (2025-2026 for the 2027 Prize). Books may be written in any language. Self-nominations are welcome. Edited collections and books written by more than two authors will not be eligible.
Call for Nominations
The Call for Nominations begins on 02 January of each year, and all nominations are due by no later than 01 March. Please note that physical copies of nominated texts are required for any books that proceed to the long-list. Copies are to be mailed to each of the members of the Judging Committee and Administration no later than 01 April, with the copies arriving no later than 01 May.
Nominations can be made to execassist@issr.org.uk. Please include the book title, author name, and a link to the publisher page for the book. If nominated by an author or a publisher, a PDF e-copy of the book is strongly encouraged to be included with the nomination email.
2025 Winners
Congratulations to the 2026 Book Prize Winners. You can read the full announcement by clicking here.
For 2026, ISSR is pleased to award the following prizes:
In the category for a general readership, the prize goes to the late Helen De Cruz for Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think (2024), published by Princeton University Press. Helen was the Danforth Chair in the Humanities at Saint Louis University. In successive chapters, she examines the role of awe and wonder in philosophy, psychology, technology, and science, and how they might transform the world. It is a clever, polymathic book, but also immensely engaging and readable. It is very sad that this was her last completed book, and by awarding her a posthumous prize for it, ISSR is pleased to honour her for all she gave to the field of science and religion throughout her career.
The academic prize goes to Peter Harrison, Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, for his book Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (2024), published by Cambridge University Press. Peter is a former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford. Some New World is his most ambitious book to date: brilliant, full of detailed research and acute new insights. In The Territories of Science and Religion, Peter drew our attention to how much the concepts of religion and science have shifted over the centuries, and in this book, he examines the concepts of ‘belief’ and the ‘supernatural’, which have also shifted significantly.
In the category for professionals and educators, the prize goes to Timothy Middleton for Witnessing a Wounded World: A Theology of Ecological Trauma (2025), published by Fordham University Press. Tim is a Tutorial Fellow in Theology at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford. He approaches ecological suffering through the lens of trauma theology, asking what kind of traumas arise from climate change, and focuses mainly on three: to communication, to flesh, and to time. He then draws on ideas about deep incarnation to develop a theological account of this ecological trauma. The book is scholarly, insightful, passionate, and committed to beginning a conversation on witnessing the world as wounded by trauma.
Previous Winners
2025
– In the academic category – Emily Qureshi-Hurst for Salvation in the Block Universe: Time, Tillich, and Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
– In the category for a general readership – Francis Collins for The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith and Trust (Little Brown & Worthy Books, 2024).
– In the category for professionals and educators – Beth Singler for Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction (Routledge, 2024).
2024
– In the academic category – Peter N. Jordan for Naturalism in the Christian Imagination: Providence and Causality in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
– In the category for a general readership – Philip Goff for Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Oxford University Press, 2023.
– In the category for professionals and educators – Nicholas Spencer for Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion. OneWorld, 2023.
2023
o In the academic category—the prize goes to Jonathan Topham for Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Bestsellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age. University of Chicago Press, 2022.
o In the general readership category—the prize goes to Andrew Briggs and Michael Reiss for Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times. Oxford University Press, 2021.
o In the category for professionals and educators—the prize goes to Donovan O Schaefer for Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin. Duke University Press, 2022.
2022
o In the academic category—the prize goes to Shoaib Ahmed Malik for Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazali and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm (Routledge).
o In the general readership category—the prize goes to John Lardas Modern for Neuromatic, or A Particular History of Religion and the Brain (University of Chicago Press).
o In the category for professionals and educators—the prize goes to Calvin Mercer and Tracy Trothen for Religion and the Technological Future: An Introduction to Biohacking, Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan).
2021
Tom Aetchner – Media and Science-Religion Conflict (Routledge, 2020)
Ariel Glucklich – The Joy of Religion: Exploring the Nature of Pleasure in the Spiritual Life (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
James W Jones – Living Religion: Embodiment, Theology and the Possibility of a Spiritual Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019)
2020
Agustin Fuentes – Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being (Yale University Press, 2019)
Silke Gülker – Transzendenz in der Wissenschaft. Studien in der Stammzellforschung in Deutschland und in den USA (Ergon, 2019)
Christopher White – Other Worlds: Spirituality and the Search for Invisible Dimensions (Harvard University Press, 2018)