Jonathan Sacks. Photo: Coopernial.

Jonathan Sacks

Former chief rabbi of Britain

Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain, was awarded the 2016 Templeton Prize, worth about $1.5 million, for his work to counter religious extremism while “affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

The US-based John Templeton Foundation said Sacks’ was prescient in his central message of respect for all faiths.

Sacks also won the 2015 National Jewish Book Award for “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.” Through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths.

“To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege,” Sacks writes in this latest work.