Timothy Dalrymple is the new president of the John Templeton Foundation. Before assuming this role, he served as CEO of Christianity Today. Tim has led several innovative media ventures and worked closely with writers, scholars, and philanthropists to elevate ideas that enrich public life. A former national champion gymnast turned philosopher of religion, he holds degrees from Stanford, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Harvard, where his doctoral work focused on the nature of suffering and religious knowledge. He joins to podcast to discuss his history, transition to the role as president, and hopes for the future. 

What inspires you to travel? Could you design a journey around the experience of awe? To learn more, we invite you to read Alene Dawson’s Templeton Ideas essay, The Awe-Seeker’s Guide to Travel.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

Tom: Welcome to the show, Tim.

Tim: Thanks. It’s good to be here.

Tom: I wanna start out by asking if you could tell me where you grew up, and what are the things that you just found so delightful in childhood?

Tim: I was fortunate to be raised in a loving family and a loving community, and my parents were very thoughtful. I think about introducing me to a wide variety of early experiences. We were also lovers of the outdoors. And lovers of natural beauty. I grew up camping and backpacking, and road tripping across the United States and going to a variety of national parks.

And that was something that definitely gave me both a sense of joy and also a sense of wonder.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Tim: When I find myself now working at the John Templeton Foundation, it’s interesting to look back at those early experiences of really feeling haunted by meaning.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Tim: Haunted by the awe and the wonder that we experience even as children when we’re having our first encounters with the beauty, the mystery, and the grandeur of the natural world. We lived where the Bay Area of California meets the Central Valley of California. And so we could go one hour to the west and we’d be at the beach. If we went a little further north, you’d get this beautiful northern California coastline with a black rock and the mountains that come right up to the cliffs.

But if you went to the east, then you could go across the Central Valley and up into Yosemite National Park, and Yosemite is absolutely one of my favorite places on the planet. So I remember some of my earliest experiences of, that sense of awe and wonder. We would backpack up to the top of Half Dome. And Half Dome is a really distinctive rock structure in Yosemite. If listeners don’t know what it is, just look it up and you’ll immediately recognize it from the pictures. And we were up there one night when there was a meteorite shower. And it was one of the most awe-inspiring experiences that I have ever had. And also one of the most celestial experiences. Right? I’ve had two other experiences since then of Total Solar eclipses, and it’s similar in that respect. You’re really confronted with your situatedness. On this planet that is hurdling through space, and there are other objects that are flying around.

And in this case, you just see this incredible show. Right? And so I think those sorts of experiences just kind of almost. Call your soul, and you feel it rising out of you. This, this sense of being haunted by purpose, that there is perhaps more to life than. Simply a bunch of rocks swirling around and somehow it’s all beautiful. Somehow it’s all mysterious. Somehow maybe it, it points to answers to questions that we have asked since time immemorial about where we come from and, is there purpose and, where are we headed and, how does love knit us together across these, times and spaces. Yeah.

Tom: Yeah, there’s, no better place to feel the gravity of those questions than staring up at the heavens.

Tim: Yeah. It’s an experience that’s all too rare, for a lot of people living in cities these days and staring at the screen that attracts our attention and might take time away from the seductive glow of the sky that so many other generations have spent so much time pondering. That is one thing that I’d like to think about that, if you were to go back 100 years, a thousand years, 10,000 years even further. It is probably the case that human beings were staring up at the sky and asking the same kinds of questions of what does this all mean? Where did this come from, if it came from anywhere, and how do we make sense of the staggering beauty of it all? So, I think I was infused from a very early age with these kind of questions that Sir John Templeton articulated so well.

Tom: Before I turned to your college studies and beyond, I wanna ask about gymnastics. Gymnastics was a huge part of my early life, and, exercised, I think an immense role in shaping who I became. It’s an activity that you spent an inordinate amount of time doing, with that time commitment, with that focus and attention, are there other dimensions that you feel like it gave you from that commitment?

Tim: Yeah, gymnastics is a fascinating sport because it’s one that requires constant failure. Over the course of a gymnastics career, you’re probably gonna learn, let’s say, 300 to 400 different skills. And every time that you’re learning a new skill, you are going to fail.

Tom: Yes.

Tim: And fail frequently. And sometimes fail spectacularly. And in gymnastics, the Olympics was kind of the end-all, be-all, right. That was the only goal. But the number of people who are actually gonna achieve that is exceptionally low. Millions of young people will be inspired by watching the Olympics to try gymnastics. Only one is gonna be the all-around champion. In any given Olympiad, which happens every four years. So the vast, vast, vast majority are going to fail somewhere along the way.

And I remember even when I won my first national all-around title when I was 15, I was telling myself internally, don’t get satisfied. This is not the goal. Unless you make the Olympics, you’re still a failure. And ultimately, I didn’t make the Olympics right. I had an injury that ended my career, but I think that learning to greet failure as a friend was one of the most important lessons that I possibly could have learned.

Another is related, and that is the value of suffering. It doesn’t always have value. There is suffering that I think is, in some ways, unredeemable. And we don’t want to valorize the people who cause suffering or anything like that. But when you are persevering through injury and through hardship and struggle, it shapes you in ways that I hardly know who I would be today, if not for the experiences of hardship that I had along the way. Fortunately, I had great experiences of success, but I also had a lot of experiences of suffering and failure, and those were probably more critical to who I became.

Tom: Yeah, a lot of athletes’ careers and with injuries, particularly performing at very high levels. Thinking back to that time in which you suffered a career-ending injury, what was going through your head when you thought, I am for sure not gonna achieve that goal that I had set for myself so many years before, and that door is slammed shut.

Tim: Well, like a lot of athletes, once you get to an elite level, there is kind of a love-hate relationship with the sport. You love that it’s something at which you excel, that you feel the value of all the hard work that you’ve put into it, and that the amount of control that you have over your body and your ability to perform in, in difficult circumstances, all of that is terrific. But it’s also an enormous investment of time. And there’s a lot of pain along the way. So, in the short term, there was a part of me that was relieved, and there was the other part of me that was disappointed. I would say over the long term, it was more challenging because you thought you were living this story and then suddenly it feels like somebody closed the book when there were supposed to be a few chapters left.

Tom: Yes. Yes.

Tim: I was injured a couple of months before the Olympic trials in 1996 and had a decent chance of making the team. If I had not made it that year in 96 and this had stayed healthy, I almost certainly would’ve made it in 2000. So, you kind of feel like there’s an unfinished story, and you wish that you knew. There’s also identity questions, right? Here’s something that made you different from everybody else, and suddenly that’s taken away. It gave you a sense of purpose and direction, and suddenly that’s gone. Fortunately, there was an, an older gymnast who he, he had already retired from gymnastics, and he was no longer a student at Stanford, but he came by the gym and he said, you’ve learned how to be excellent at one thing.

Now take everything you learned and go be excellent at something else. And that gave me a sort of mental frame that. Everything I had done was still beneficial. Mm-hmm. And maybe the real purpose of that whole story in my life was developing the skills that would be applied in other areas of life.

Tom: Yeah. In one respect, you wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, but you also had this idea of becoming a physicist studying physics and philosophy. So, tell me this other part of the story. You went to Stanford to study physics.

Tim: Yeah, and honestly, I always knew gymnastics was a short-term. It’s over by the time you’re 24, if you’re lucky. And I always had a sense that developing myself physically was important, but developing myself mentally and spiritually was more important.

And ultimately, that was where I would have the opportunity to impact the world, hopefully in a more substantial way. So it wasn’t as though I was left entirely bereft. Once gymnastics was taken away, I did have a sense of a trajectory, and so I had come to Stanford, and I thought I would do philosophy and physics. I ended up taking some courses in the religious studies department my freshman year that reintroduced me to the Danish philosophers, or in Kierkegaard, and I had read a little bit of him in my high school years, and coming back to him in the college years was revelatory. And I decided that I would do philosophy and religious studies instead of philosophy and physics.

And then that really set the course of the rest of my academic career, which was at the intersection of those two disciplines. So the religious studies department asked fantastic questions, but didn’t have a whole lot of methodological rigor, at least in my experience. And there are different ways of doing the study of religion, sociologically, psychologically, et cetera.

But the philosophy department had terrific rigor. I wasn’t as interested in the questions that were being asked in that specific philosophy department at the time. So, to bring together those big picture existential questions that were being asked in the religious studies department with the philosophical rigor that you found in the philosophy department, that was essentially what I decided I would do

I thought for the rest of my life, and it also gave me an avenue, given the injury that ended my career and the chronic pain that came pursuant to that injury. It gave me an opportunity to dig into the questions of suffering and to make that a central theme of my work and academia. And so, I wrote a master’s thesis on the topic and then ultimately wrote my doctoral dissertation on the topic as well.

Tom: Graduating from college, you had focused your attention to philosophy and religious studies, and then you did both master’s studies and doctoral studies. Tell me a little bit about what made you choose Princeton Theological Seminary for that first foray.

Tim: Yeah. My most atheistic or agnostic professor in the religious studies department at Stanford strongly encouraged me to consider getting a seminary degree, a Master’s of Divinity, M.Div. He felt like there were a lot of people coming out of theology programs who lacked familiarity with the history of the church, with biblical languages and biblical interpretation, with systematic theology, and so on, and they were going too quickly into hyperspecialized subcategories of theology, and so he thought you should go somewhere where you are gonna take the biblical languages, get a big picture vision of the history and theology of the church before going into the specialized work of a doctoral program. It was also the case. I was involved with Christian ministry, and so an M.Div. program will include some training in things like preaching, and it would require you to do some ministry internships. And so, I welcomed that, and I ended up at Princeton Seminary doing internships at a Chinese American church that was there in Princeton and then also down the street in Trenton at New Jersey State Prison.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Tim: And those were two wildly different environments in which to try to address people’s spiritual needs. So that was what took me to Princeton Seminary, and I coming out of a kind of West Coast evangelical environment into Princeton Seminary. I was a bit out of my cultural waters. But I found students and faculty that I loved and respected, and had a very good experience there. But it was always the case that the intent was not to go into full-time ministry. It was to go on an academic track. So, then I looked at places like Harvard, where I ended up going for my PhD, ’cause I wanted to teach in a secular university environment. That was the goal. And so going there and getting a PhD at a secular university seemed like the more practical path.

Tom: So, you went and got that PhD. It’s a long, practical path, for instance, becoming a professor, teaching at a university, but you also diverged from that path. Tell me a little bit about the pivot. You got the master’s degree and the doctorate, but I’m not calling you Professor Dalrymple, and we’re not at University of Pennsylvania together.

So tell me a little bit, you got that degree, and then what happened next?

Tim: Yeah, so there was a stretch of about 10 years there where I just felt like, clearly, this is my path to, hopefully, be a relatively winsome and articulate Christian presence at the secular university. And to teach and have an impact on the students there, but also to write and do my research. That, from 20 to 30, really seemed like the path that I was on. Then, toward the end of my PhD program, there was an explosion online, this wild new environment of philosophical and social discourse, and that’s the rise of new media, digital media, social media. The blogosphere was exploding, and it seemed like the Wild West was just unfolding in front of us. And there was a lot of idealism at the time too, and it’s a little ironic to remember some of this now, but at the time, and I’m, I’m referring to let’s say 2007, 2008, we all seemed to hope that the biogosphere and social media were going to lead to greater, better, more informed, more charitable conversations where the best arguments would win out and it would have this sort of democratizing impact on social discourse. And I saw this conversation unfolding online over the same questions that had inspired me my entire life. And, it was in a day-to-day or in the trenches kind of pace as opposed to the more stately, you might say, glacial pace of academic conversation.

And, I was approached by some folks who were about to launch a website called Pathos, and it was intended to reproduce online the marketplace of religious ideas. And so, I began to do that on the side as I finished up my PhD and then began to teach, but quickly that exploded, and that became one of the world’s largest religion websites by some measures. It was the largest religious website. So I found that this not only matched my intellectual interest, but also my love of, which I didn’t even know that I had, but a love of entrepreneurialism. And being in an environment where you are. Building things and innovating and working together with a creative team to do, do so.

Tom: So you got a taste of working with a startup business, and then you pivoted to Christianity Today. Tell me a little bit about what it’s like to work for a media outlet that has a long history and a long back catalog. What are the sort of opportunities and challenges you had in that environment?

Tim: Yeah. And there was a step in between as well. And I’m grateful that there was, because it taught me a lot. And so after my years at Pathos, I founded a business. It began to grow and became my sole focus for about six years. And it was called Polymath. And this was a creative agency. And essentially, in my work for pathos, I had come in contact with a lot of other organizations that needed help coming into the 21st century. Understanding how do we navigate this emerging media marketplace? Or how do we tell our story, and how do we think about branding, web design and development, and strategy? And, so I began to do that work on the side, and quickly it became far larger than I could manage myself.

And so I started the business, grew it, and led that and learned a great deal. Not just about branding and design and web development and video development and all of that, but also about human resources and about making payroll and operations and financial management and so on. And so, by the time that I came to Christianity Today, fortunately, I had some experience within the media landscape, but I also had experience managing an organization. Now, to your point, Christianity Today is wildly different from pathos, and it is a legacy media institution that has very well-established ways of doing things. So it was a real honor to come in and work with an excellent team and think about how to steward that legacy.

What ought to be our editorial strategy in the midst of a radically polarized environment?

Tom: No doubt.

Tim: So, we found ourselves at the center of, it seemed, every political and cultural, and ecclesial conflict. And trying to model a way of being thoughtful and gracious in the midst of that. Now there are people on the left and the right who would say that we did not succeed at that goal. There are a lot of people in the middle who would say that, that we did, and so the team carries that on today. It was a pretty remarkable thing, and, not unrelated to the transition here to the John Templeton Foundation, because here too, you have a storied founder. And a long legacy and a lot of impact and a lot of people care about you and your reputation and what you do, and a lot of people will debate whether you’re making the right decisions, and so on. So, coming here too, I feel like that experience at Christianity Today equipped me well.

Tom:  I think it’s easy to imagine the challenges you would face working at Christianity Today and the whole bulletin board of controversies that get swept up into. But what did you find most satisfying about working there?

Tim:  I arrived at Christianity today in May of 2019,

Tom: Wow.

Tim: So, we had to navigate the social upheavals that came through the COVID era. And at the same time, there was this thread of reckoning with abuse within the Christian context. So this was an issue that had been on simmer for a while, obviously, we know the stories within the Catholic church, but of course it’s not particular just to Catholics. So as more stories began to emerge about abuse within the Protestant Christian context, and especially within the evangelical Protestant context, we were a part of that, and we reported on those stories and even found some stories in our own history that we needed to reckon with.

And so I think what I’m proud of is the prayerful, thoughtful, and I hope gracious way that we walked through all of those different controversies, not casting aspersions toward people who hold opposing points of view. But holding open a space for a thoughtful dialogue, that’s what I found most satisfying ultimately.

Tom: Yeah, a legacy brand, it has a long history, and with that comes a lot of things that one has to reckon with. And I think, living well in the present and future means being attentive to the past.

Tim: The founder of Christianity today was Billy Graham. I don’t know how many times I was told that Billy Graham must be turning in his grave. I think he’s just kind of on a constant cycle, spinning apparently, but from the left and the right, I would hear that was very frequent. And then of course there would be other people who were like, Hey, you’re doing exactly what Billy Graham talked about, I’m not for the left wing, I’m not for the right wing, I’m for the whole bird.

Yeah, and I’d say that Christianity Today has never been conservative enough for hyper conservatives. It’s certainly not been liberal enough for progressives and you can go back decades and find the same kind of critique, so it’s hard to occupy that middle space.

But we tried to do, that, and we did our best.

Tom: Yeah. I’m gonna turn down to the John Templeton Foundation. You are new to your role as president, but your contact with JTF began many years ago. Tell me a little bit about how you first came in contact with them and what inspired you.

Tim: Yeah, I was just on the phone earlier today with the woman who directed my doctoral program, and that’s Sarah Coley at Harvard. And she had a really fascinating project where she was paired with an evolutionary mathematician by the name of Martin Novak, and they worked together at the Theology and the Science of Love and Cooperation and Altruism. And I was kind of around the edges of that project. I participated directly in, another project that was also JTF funded, but smaller, around pain and the body. So, those were my early introductions to the John Templeton Foundation, and this is a foundation that stands at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Whether that is the natural sciences, or the mathematical and physical sciences, the life sciences, it’s the social sciences, it’s philosophy, it’s theology, it’s ethics, it’s education, it’s economics.

And it’s a place that’s unafraid to ask the big questions and to seek new insights into some of the most fundamental and enduring questions of human history. And so I’ve been fascinated with JTF ever since those first encounters and had the opportunity over the years to participate in other projects since that time. That only grew my sense of respect for the foundation and the impact it has on the world.

Tom: Well, Tim, not many people have an opportunity to lead a foundation. I’m curious, in the short time you’ve been here, what do you wake up excited about each day?

Tim: Well, number one, it’s an outstanding team. Top to bottom. I’m impressed with the professionalism and the passion that people bring to the work that they do. Number two, it’s a really remarkable legacy. So we steward the tradition of Sir John Templeton, and we take that very seriously. But number three, I think it’s just a remarkable place from which to participate in the history of ideas.

And I like to think that we are early-stage investors in mind-blowing paradigm-shifting ideas, and that’s across a fairly broad range of disciplines, as we were saying. And so wherever there are questions that are. Fundamentally human, almost elemental, primal questions. And wherever there are ways of bringing new ideas and new information into those questions, I think you can find the John Templeton Foundation to your point. So that would be the third is that, just the remarkable impact that you can have by finding people who have. Been destined to impact the world with new ideas, new insights, and supporting those people and supporting those projects and catalyzing those conversations that can move people to have a bigger, grander sense of the universe and their place within it.

Tom: So, I’m curious, as you look forward to your tenure as president here, John Templeton Foundation, we want to explore questions, make discoveries that require reflection, deep engagement, patience, maybe failure, and frustration. These are hard questions. How do we do that? In a society and in an information landscape in which there’s a sort of gravitational pull towards beer outrage entertainment, even in educational space is being dominated by the readily accessible. How do we do that now?

Tim: Yeah. It’s a radically destabilized environment. You have the social environment with so much polarization and so much conflict. A lot of the work that we do is together with universities. Not all of it, but a lot of it does take place within university settings. And that itself is a destabilized market. The evolution and the future of universities are very much being, I think, discerned and renegotiated right now. And then the philanthropic landscape is experiencing a great deal of turmoil right now as well, with very substantial cuts to federal funding in a lot of different areas.

And, so it is an environment of change. It is an environment that is going to need constant assessment and innovation. But people are gonna continue to ask these questions for decades and centuries, and we’re gonna do the best that we can to bring forward information now, without believing that we are necessarily gonna find the answer.

You know, Sir John sometimes would talk about how little we know, how eager to learn, or he would talk about, you know, if we were to go back a hundred years ago, people might have thought they had figured out everything there was to figure out. And yet here now from a perspective a hundred years later, we know actually there were a lot of things that we were wrong about a hundred years ago. And, probably a hundred years from now, there’s still gonna be a lot that’s undiscovered or that some generation is gonna look back and say, Wow.

Tim and Tom had no idea what they were talking about. So, I think we do faithful work, bringing resources and support and encouragement and maybe a little bit of insight. To the best projects and the best people that we can find that are bringing new information, new vantage points, and new insights to bear on life’s oldest questions.

And we trust that at the end of the day, polarization is exhausting. And I think that the pendulum will swing back. There are still facts of the matter. The John Templeton Foundation works together with scientists of many different stripes to bring together actual concrete facts and base our insights into life’s most important questions on the outflow of that research.

And so we expect that the John Templeton Foundation will continue to do this for, certainly decades and, probably for centuries. So, I’m not overly concerned about the dynamics of the current environment. I think if we continue to root what we’re doing and the best information that we have and stay humble and stay curious, that we’re gonna continue to do good work.

Tom: Thanks for talking to me today, and I look forward to seeing where we head together.

Tim: Thanks, Tom. It’s been a pleasure.