Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?
Dinah Washington / Alain Delon ReMix
Pat is far kinder than I am.
Here I am already, playing 6 degrees of separation with his name, sniffing around for clues that may telegraph that Templeton's motivations & agendas were nefarious.
I don't know that they were or were not yet. I will continue my searching and render a judgment in future post.
In any event, I hope my instinct is wrong in this case , and that Pat is right.
But I tend to doubt it. ;~)
~ Her Spleenfulness
Who is John Templeton?
Like millions you may have seen this man without thought. Often on Wall Street shows, this soft spoken man gave his take on investing. He was rarely interrupted. As The Telegraph reports:
"John Marks Templeton was born on November 29 1912 at Winchester, Tennessee, the son of a small town lawyer and cotton merchant. Brought up strictly as a Presbyterian, aged 15 he became superintendent of his local Sunday school."
"Templeton boasted one of the longest and most successful track records on Wall Street. From its foundation in 1954, his Templeton Growth Fund grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 16 per cent a year until Templeton’s retirement in 1992, making it the top performing growth fund in the second half of the 20th century.A $100,000 stake invested in 1954, with distributions reinvested, would have grown to $55 million in 1999."
Thousands of Americans entrusted their saving to this man. His initial, average investor was a church going family from the Midwest that entrusted their savings to Templeton because they sensed he shared their religious values. They made an excellent choice, because as it turned out, he did. Templeton started each investors meeting with a prayer. He wrote or edited 10 books on Christianity, religion, and religious ethics in his lifetime.
As a young man he worked his way through Yale by winning cash prizes, scholarships, and creating a student newspaper that sold advertising. He graduated at the top of his class and became a Rhodes Scholar. His first rel investment came after a bit of study. He borrowed $10,000 and invested the money in 104 stocks that sold for less than a dollar a share, including 34 in bankruptcy. Within a few years he turn a profit on 100 of the investments and that commenced a long road to fortune. But he is known for much more. Templeton was an almost unequaled philanthropist. He started giving early in his life and never stopped.And because he directed the investments of his philanthropic foundations and grants, they thrived.
In 1973 he inaugurated the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, an annual award to remedy the Nobel Foundation’s omission of religion from its prizes.
A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel, and arranged for the Duke of Edinburgh to present the award at Buckingham Palace, thus ensuring full press coverage.
From 1973, when it stood at £70,000, the prize money has risen to £820,000, making the 
Templeton Prize one of the world’s largest annual monetary awards.
Winners over the years have included Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Reverend Dr Billy Graham, and Charles Colson, the Watergate-burglar-turned-minister. Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Jews also qualified to win the prize.
But this was only a drop in the ocean of Templeton’s philanthropy. He endowed university courses in spirituality and science, funded medical schools to run classes on healing and spirituality, and rewarded universities and individuals that upheld “traditional educational values”, schools that promoted “character development” and colleges that taught market economics.
There were also Templeton Prizes for “Inspiring Movies and TV” and for “Exemplary Papers in Humility Theology”.
The core purpose of the John Templeton Foundation is thus,
"The mission of the Foundation is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for discovery in areas engaging life's biggest questions. These questions range from explorations into the laws of nature and the universe to questions on the nature of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity. Our philanthropic vision is derived from John Templeton's commitment to rigorous scientific research and related cutting-edge scholarship."
Templeton firmly believed, as do his prize winners, which include famous scientists from every discipline, that there would be a convergence of science and religion. That essentially the core of religion as he understood it, God, love, charity, and compassion would be scientifically realized and that science would be employed to better lives. He wanted the elements of religion as vigorously explored as any other scientific endeavor.
John Templeton died July 9, 2008, in the Bahamas, where he resided. Let us hope that the core purposes of his foundations remain as he wished, and not be subverted by academics into leftist, secular , anti-Western causes as have the other great foundations.
Additional Source
Please see also:
TOM & JERRY 1946
Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?
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