Templeton Report: 2008

Writing recently in Newsweek, columnist Daniel Gross observed that “thrift, like the repossession business, is one of those classic countercyclical industries.” When the economy starts shrinking, Americans “start saving and investing rather than borrowing and splurging.” But that is not how Sir John Templeton wanted people to think about thrift, according to JTF Executive Vice President Arthur Schwartz. “He wanted it to be something like honesty, part of who you are and the way you want to be.”

That is the Big Question posed in the latest of the Templeton Foundation's advertorials, which has been running this fall in newspapers and magazines in the United States and the UK. The advertorials bring together different combinations of the thirteen distinguished commentators and public figures who have written essays responding to the question. Contributors include former U.S.

“Fun” might not be the first word that comes to mind when most people think of advanced physics and mathematics, but it seems to trip off the tongue of Anthony Aguirre every couple of minutes. Aguirre, the associate scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and a professor of physics at UC-Santa Cruz, says he is excited about the “fun, diabolical questions” being asked by the scientists who were awarded grants by the Institute in July.

Charlotte Hays likes to recall what her friends said when they heard she was the new editor of In Character, the John Templeton Foundation's tri-annual journal of the "everyday virtues." "They all made jokes about how vice is really more interesting," she says. Hays responded by going out to buy "tons of books on the virtues." Reading through them, she discovered "whole classical systems of thought that we don't know much about, or take at all seriously.

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 on July 8, 2008, at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, of pneumonia.

The Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship is an annual program that enables a select group of writers and editors Templeton-Cambridge Attendees to delve into the Big Questions at the contentious intersection of science and religion. In early June, this year's class of ten fellows travelled to the UK to take up residence in Cambridge. After a two-week seminar at Queens' College conducted by scientists and scholars from the U.S.

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) is widely considered the foundational text of free-market capitalism. Less well known, but equally important in appreciating Smith's achievement, is the book that preceded his economic classic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the great Scotsman argued that morality comes naturally to us. There are "evidently some principles in [man's] nature," he wrote, "which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."