# God’s Philanthropist: John Templeton and the Pursuit of Progress

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/gods-philanthropist-john-templeton-and-the-pursuit-of-progress/
- Published: 2026-08-26T08:08:49+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**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](https://academic.oup.com/book/63124).

## 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.

 * **[Buy God’s Philanthropist from Amazon](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0197906346?tag=219)**

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