In Memoriam: Sir John Templeton, Pioneer Investor and Philanthropist, Dies at Age 95

-- Publishers Weekly, 7/9/2008

John Marks Templeton, the pioneer global investor who founded the Templeton Mutual Funds and for the past three decades devoted his fortune to his Foundation's work on the "Big Questions" of science, religion, and human purpose, passed away July 8, 2008, at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, of pneumonia.

In 1972, he established the world's largest annual award given to an individual, the £1,000,000 Templeton Prize, which is announced in New York and presented in London. The Prize is intended to recognize exemplary achievement in work related to life's spiritual dimension. Its monetary value always exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes—Templeton's way of underscoring his belief that advances in the spiritual domain are no less important than those in other areas of human endeavor.

Templeton's progressive ideas on finance, faith, and spirituality made him a distinctive figure in both fields, but the soft-spoken Southerner never worried about being an iconoclast. "Rarely does a conservative become a hero of history," he observed in his 1981 book, The Humble Approach, one of more than a dozen books he wrote or edited.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the first Templeton Prize Laureate in 1973, followed later that decade by the evangelist Billy Graham and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In recent years, the Prize has been awarded primarily to physicists, cosmologists, and philosophers, including Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, Ian Barbour, John Polkinghorne, George Ellis, Charles Townes, John Barrow, Charles Taylor and Michael Heller.