Featured Grant
India's Path Forward
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"The Indian economy is at a crossroads," says Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading authority on free trade and globalization and a prestigious University Professor at Columbia University in New York. "India is moving from the completion of conventional economic reforms, such as removing industrial licensing requirements," to what he calls “second-generation reforms” in areas like health care and education. Just how the country’s leaders should proceed is a question that Bhagwati and his colleague Arvind Panagariya will be examining over the next four years with the support of a major grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
For more information, see the November 4, 2009 issue of the Templeton Report.
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Core Themes
In keeping with Sir John Templeton's intent, his Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for research and discoveries relating to what scientists and philosophers call the Big Questions. We support work at the world's top universities in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social science relating to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose, and the nature and origin of religious belief. We also seek to stimulate new thinking about wealth creation in the developing world, character education in schools and universities, and programs for cultivating the talents of gifted children. Learn more about the Foundation's "Core Themes."
Funding Areas
Click on the funding areas below for an overview and a sampling of grant profiles.
Featured Book
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
by Nicholas Wade
The Penguin Press
November 2009
For the last 50,000 years, and probably much longer, human beings have practiced one or another religion. But little attention has been given to explaining the universality of religious behavior. How did it become hardwired into human nature? In his new book, supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the acclaimed New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for survival.
As a force that binds people together and motivates individuals to put the interests of society above their own, religion encouraged moral behavior toward those within the group and aggression, when necessary, toward those outside it. Religion thus provided the earliest human societies with their equivalents of law and government. Wade describes how religion influences morality and trust, governs people’s reproductive practices and demography, motivates soldiers for warfare, and unites social organizations as small as parishes and as vast as civilizations. A compelling and original contribution to the scientific study of religion, The Faith Instinct examines both the weaknesses of modern religions and the strengths that account for their remarkable persistence.
