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Alvin Plantinga, 84, a pioneering advocate for theism as a serious philosophical position within academic circles, has been named the winner of the 2017 Templeton Prize.

Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foun­dation, said in a statement, “Alvin Plantinga recognized that not only did religious belief not conflict with serious philosophical work, but that it could make crucial contributions to addressing perennial problems in philosophy.”

It’s a popular belief: the more educated a person is, the less religious he or she likely will be. And it’s mostly right, but with exceptions, according to a recently released analysis of Pew Research Center surveys.

“I think the answer is, ‘Well, it’s complicated,’” said Gregory Smith. “On the one hand, if you just look at the public as a whole, there’s no question people with the highest levels of educational attainment tend to be less religious than those with lower levels of educational attainment.”

The sound reverberates through the space, immersing hundreds of spellbound listeners. Eyes fall closed, heads bow in prayer, and fidgety limbs come to rest. The crowd is lost in a Byzantine soundscape as five singers chant the Akathistos hymn, an Orthodox liturgical chant composed in the sixth century.

England’s cathedrals are often de­scribed as the crown jewels of the nation’s architectural heritage, yet their future is in doubt following a series of financial crises.

Most of the 42 Anglican cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages as Catholic churches and were taken over by the fledgling Church of England following the English Reformation, when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of monasteries. Issues of maintenance and repair are causing most of the cathedrals’ problems today.

When Paula Huston first met the monks of the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Benedictine monastic community perched on cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she was in her late thirties and considered herself an atheist.

“I don’t think I’d ever even talked to a priest before, much less seen a monk, and here were these monks, and they were dressed in their interesting and strange white robes, and it just struck me so hard that this was really a radically alternative way to live,” she recalled.

Ken Yakielashek, a Roman Catholic semiretired farmer in the Canadian Prairies, remembers when Christians of varying denominations “wouldn’t talk to one another.”

To Yakielashek, that makes what’s happened in Dauphin, Manitoba—a rural community 200 miles northwest of the provincial capital of Winnipeg—all the more remarkable.

A year and a half ago, three churches put aside theological differences and came together to sponsor the resettlement of three Syrian refugee families to this town of 8,500.