Sir John Marks Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune as a pioneer in global mutual funds, then gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding of what he called “spiritual realities,” passed away on 8 July 2008 in the Doctor’s Hospital in Nassau, the Bahamas, where he had lived for decades. He was 95. Skip to next paragraph His death was caused by pneumonia, said Donald Lehr, a spokesman for the John Templeton Foundation.

John Templeton was born into a poor Tennessee family. He attended Yale University on a scholarship and graduated at the top of his class with a degree in economics in 1934. He went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and obtained a master of arts in law in 1936. Returning to the United States he went to New York to work as a trainee for Fenner &

Beane, one of the predecessor firms of Merrill Lynch.

Templeton co-founded an investment firm that would become Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance in the depths of the Depression in 1937. The firm was successful and grew to $300 million in assets with eight mutual funds under management. In 1954, Templeton also started the Templeton Growth Fund, based in Nassau in the Bahamas. Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance eventually changed its name to Templeton Damroth, and Templeton eventually sold his stake in the firm in 1962.

During the next 25 years, Templeton created some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds. He sold his Templeton funds in 1992 to the Franklin Group. In 1999, Money Magazine called him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century." As a naturalized British citizen living in the Bahamas, Templeton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his many accomplishments.

Upon his retirement from the investment business, Templeton became an active philanthropist worldwide through his John Templeton Foundation, which focuses its donations on spiritual and scientific research.

The John Templeton Foundation, based in West Conshohocken, Pa., was established in 1987 to administer the prize and promote “projects to apply scientific methodology to the study of religious subjects,” with room for theoretical physics; evolutionary biology; cognitive science; and research into love, human purpose and the nature and origin of religious beliefs. Today, with a $1.5 billion endowment, it awards the Templeton Prize, one of the world’s richest, and sponsors conferences and studies reflecting the founder’s passionate interest in “progress in religion” and “research or discoveries” on the nebulous borders of science and religion.

The Centre for Civil Society (CCS), New Delhi has been into a long term relationship with the Templeton Foundation for its work in India. CCS is a recipient of the Templeton Freedom Prize for Free Market Solutions to Poverty in 2004 and the Templeton Freedom Prize for the Student Outreach Program in 2005. In the year 2006, CCS received a Challenge Grant of half a million dollar which supported CCS’s largest program in India, the School Choice Campaign.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality and promoted a search for answers to what he called the “Big Questions” in the realms of science, faith, God and the purpose of humanity.

Along the way, he became one of the world’s richest men, gave up American citizenship, moved to the Bahamas, and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor and an array of prominent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.

In Nassau, his net worth swelled into the billions, but his lifestyle remained relatively modest. He drove his own car and spent his days reading, writing and managing his foundation. Visitors were given sandwiches, tea and courtly advice in the afternoon at his white-columned antebellum-style home on Lyford Cay, set on a hillside lush with citrus trees and bougainvillea, overlooking a golf course and the ocean.

John Templeton is survived by his son John M. Templeton, Jr., known as Jack, who retired as a pediatric surgeon in 1995 to become president of the John Templeton Foundation, his son Christopher, stepdaughter Wendy Brooks, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His daughter, Anne Templeton Zimmerman, died in 2004 and his stepson, Malcolm Butler, died in 1995.

A private ceremony is planned for family members in the Bahamas. There will be a memorial service at Princeton University Chapel on November 21, 2008 at 2pm.