Sir John M. Templeton, the renowned investor and spiritually guided philanthropist, died Tuesday at the age of 95. In a 1997 "Assessment," David Plotz called Sir Templeton "the defining philanthropist of our time." The piece is reprinted below.
Andrew Carnegie's libraries embodied the democratic confidence of the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller's universities enshrined the scientific meliorism of the Progressive Era. But the defining philanthropist of our time is not a university builder or an art collector or a chair endower. It is Sir John Marks Templeton, religious philanthropist, investment wizard, amateur philosopher, and full-bore crank.
A do-gooder for the end of the millennium, Templeton pays professors to promote conservative values, universities to build character, and researchers to investigate the connections between faith and science. He believes he can reconcile the irreconcilable contradictions of contemporary society: Christian conservatism and New Age loopiness, capitalist greed and sweet charity, old-time religion and modern technology.
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