Professor Tom McLeish Receives Lanfranc Award

Pembroke Senior Associate, Professor Tom McLeish, received the Lanfranc Award for services to education within the Church of England at the 2018 Lambeth Awards, presented by Archbishop Justin Welby. The award recognises Professor McLeish’s ‘record as one of the most outstanding scientists of his generation, and the leading contemporary lay Anglican voice in the dialogue of science and faith’. Professor McLeish has also recently assumed his appointment as Chair in Natural Philosophy in the University of York.

Professor McLeish has been a Reader in the Anglican Church since 1993, in the dioceses of Ripon and York. Alongside his role at the University of York, he chairs the Royal Society’s education committee.  As a polymath, who sees Christian theology as foundational for the exploration of interdisciplinary work, Professor McLeish considers theological expression of ancient proto-scientific thinking, bringing long-lived Christian narratives to bear on issues in contemporary science and technology.

He has published in macromolecular biological physics and extensively on issues of theology, ethics and the history of science, and is a key leader of the Ordered Universe project – an interdisciplinary research collaboration between the universities of Durham, Oxford and York, which examines scientific thinking in the 12th-14th Centuries.  

Responding to the Lanfranc Award Professor McLeish commented: I am delighted about this award, more for what it says about the changes of attitude within the Church of England towards science, than for anything personal. For too long the church has tended to see science as a threat rather than a gift, and in so doing has forgotten its own heritage. The great medieval philosopher, theologian and incontrovertibly also scientist, Robert Grosseteste, is the central study of the project that links me to Pembroke. After writing deeply perceptive studies on light, matter, sound, comets and the rainbow he became Bishop of Lincoln (and so would, in 1235, have had jurisdiction over Oxford!). I am looking forward immensely to completing the volumes of edition, translation and commentary on his scientific works that our Durham-Oxford-York team are working on for OUP. Perhaps the days of scientist-bishops are not over after all...

The 2018 Lambeth Awards were presented to Christians from Africa, the Far East and the UK, and were presented by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace in April this year. Launched by Archbishop Welby in 2016, they recognise outstanding service to the Church of England, across different fields. Read more about the Lambeth Awards and this year’s recipients here.