After delays in the process due to the pandemic, Indiana Wesleyan University’s John Wesley Honors College is pleased to announce that the 2020 Aldersgate Prize has been awarded to Noah Toly for his book, The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics (Oxford University Press).
Motivated by the ethos of its Christian liberal learning community, the John Wesley Honors College awards the Aldersgate Prize annually to celebrate the outstanding achievement of an author whose scholarship challenges reductionistic trends in academia by yielding a broadly integrative analysis of life’s complexities and by shedding fresh light on ultimate questions that can enrich Christian conceptions of human flourishing. After reviewing more than seventy nominations for this year’s prize, the Aldersgate Prize selection committee chose The Gardeners’ Dirty Handsas the best exemplar of this sort of scholarly work.
In light of the past three centuries in which the globe has witnessed the accumulation of unprecedented levels of wealth and the production of unsustainable environmental risks, The Gardeners’ Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics explores how we might address this situation with the realization that matters are far more complex than environmental justice advocates and economists tend to envision. In his assessment of environmental policy and governance, Toly is keen to establish viable criteria and frameworks for Christian discernment; but he does so while directing readers to the fact that any effort—Christian or otherwise—to promote the greatest good will always, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, face choices that demand tradeoffs and sacrifices that are by definition tragic. Accordingly, he demonstrates that good Christian stewardship of a complex, dynamic environment requires the embrace of a tragic exercise, meaning that all of our right and good choices remain entangled with limitations and distresses that leave us with “dirty hands.” Because environmental challenges such as climate change can be traced to some of the most ordinary, mundane, good, and even necessary of human activities, Christian ethics must traffic in legitimate competing alternatives in relation to our global environment. To steward creation, as we lean into the redemptive dawning of new creation, Christians must cultivate a cruciform imaginary of self-sacrifice that rises above mindsets of scarcity, efficiency, and idealistic rhetoric in order to bear the brunt of good—yet tragic—choices.
Dr. Toly is a professor of urban studies, politics, and international relations who recently took up the post of provost at Calvin University. He is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Global Cities at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and has taught on cities and urbanism in the Free University of Berlin’s Center for Global Politics. Toly also serves on the Advisory Council of Together Chicago, as well as the Steering Committee of the Thriving Cities Project and on the research team for the Project on Vocation and the Common Good, both based at the University of Virginia.
Dr. Toly will accept the Aldersgate Prize on October 20, 2021 when he visits the IWU campus to deliver an address on his book as part of the President’s Author Series.
The selection committee for the 2020 Aldersgate Prize included the dean and faculty of the John Wesley Honors College (http://www.indwes.edu/Academics/JWHC/JWHC-Community/), as well as Stacy Hammons (Provost, IWU), Willem Van De Merwe (Blanchard Chair in Physics, IWU, Emeritus), Stephen Pierce (Assistant Professor of History, IWU), and Dr. Vittorio Montemaggi (Lecturer in Religion and the Arts at King’s College London).
Nominations are open for the 2022 Aldersgate Prize (http://www.indwes.edu/Academics/JWHC/Aldersgate-Prize/).