Duke Divinity School Professor Norman Wirzba has been named a Henry Luce III Fellow for 2014-15. The fellowship will provide Wirzba with a $70,000 award during his upcoming sabbatical year.

The Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology program is designed to encourage research that promises to contribute to theological inquiry and provide leadership in theological scholarship. Since its inception in 1994, the program has funded projects that both emphasize the interdisciplinary character of theological scholarship and education and address the needs of the academy, communities of faith, and the wider society. Fellows present their findings at a yearly conference and in both scholarly and popular journals.

During 2015, Wirzba will work on two book projects. The first, From Nature to Creation: Christian Life in a Post-Natural Age, examines recent philosophical critiques of the idea of “nature” as it has developed in modernity and proposes the Christian teaching of creation as a way for people to imagine and live more faithfully in the world. It will be published by Baker Academic Press. The second book, Creation, Creatureliness, and Creativity: An Essay on the Human Place in the World, will show how the doctrine of creation has profound implications for understanding what it is to be human and what humans are to do in the world. Creativity emerges as humanity’s central task because it is the way through which people participate in God’s redemptive ways with the world. This book will be published by Cambridge University Press.

The Luce fellowship program is administered by the Association of Theological Schools, the accrediting and program agency for graduate theological education in the United States and Canada. Its more than 270 member institutions are Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant schools of theology, including freestanding seminaries and university-related divinity schools.