Local Man Named One of Time’s ‘100 Most Influential’

The Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Richard Cizik.

1985 Nobel Peace Prize winner Richard Cizik of Stafford has been named one of Time Magazine’s 100 World’s Most Influential People. Cizik is an evangelical Presbyterian minister who is credited, along with Eric Chivian, with helping to bridge the divide between religion and science.

What brings Chivian and Cizik together is a shared passion for the environment, although they act on that passion in very different ways. Chivian is a highly trained scientist who tells stories like a teacher with the bedside manner of the general-practice physician he used to be. Cizik quotes the Bible, carefully referring to “creation care” rather than climate change or global warming, and advocates a brand of pro-life politics that extends well beyond human conception, up through the care of God’s creation itself.