God’s Philanthropist: John Templeton and the Pursuit of Progress
An Oxford University Press study sets out to explain why the investor turned philanthropist in science and religion gave the way he did.
Sir John Templeton (1912 to 2008) was a Wall Street pioneer who built one of the world’s most successful investment funds before turning in later life to philanthropy on a vast scale. He founded the Templeton Prize, the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust and the Templeton World Charity Foundation, organisations that between them continue to award tens of millions of pounds a year. For anyone who has ever tried to make sense of a major funder’s priorities, or wondered how a donor’s personal worldview ends up written into grant-making criteria decades after their death, this book is directly relevant.
Author Peter N. Jordan, a Research Fellow at Oxford’s Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and a former external adviser to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, draws on Templeton’s own books, essays, interviews and occasional writings to reconstruct the belief system behind the money. He organises that worldview around three themes Templeton returned to repeatedly: religion, political economy and modern science, and traces how each shaped the instructions Templeton left his foundations to follow.
Templeton’s UK connections are extensive: he studied at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and later endowed Templeton College, Oxford.
His model of values-driven, faith-inspired major giving, and the long institutional afterlife of a single donor’s convictions, offers a case study in donor motivation and legacy grantmaking that will interest anyone working with major donors, family foundations or faith-based funders.
Jordan’s book is available from Oxford Academic.
About Peter N Jordan
Peter N. Jordan is a Research Fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, and Director of Grants and Research at Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford (SCIO). He previously served as an external Programme Adviser to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the International Society for Science and Religion. His first book, Naturalism in the Christian Imagination, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
Related books on UK Fundraising
- Philanthropy in America: A History (Zunz)
- Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy (Ostrower)
- Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears Roebuck and advanced the cause of black education in the American south (Peter M Ascoli)
- Call for research project in generosity and giving (16 August 2007)
- L’Arche’s founder wins £1.1 million Templeton Prize
