It’s shoveled more than a billion and a half dollars at research attempting to reconcile the spiritual and the secular. Is the foundation’s quest just some rich guy’s pie-in-the-sky dream or the key to human happiness?
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For more than three decades, the John Templeton Foundation has been shoveling money at researchers in an effort to reconcile science and religion. Illustration by Zach Meyer
One would think claims of performing miracles would have a bit more resonance.
After all, billions of people today hinge their religious faith on Jesus doing just that a couple thousand years ago. So when Christianity Todaypublished a story on faith healer Heidi Baker back in 2012 — a story that validated her claims to have healed dozens of blind and deaf Mozambicans, and also mentioned her bringing dead people back to life — it seemed the sort of thing that would make a big splash, especially in the less-crowded news cycle of those simpler days, back when Facebook was still benign and Donald Trump hadn’t yet ridden the escalator down from his quarters in Trump Tower.
It’s true that Christianity Today is a niche publication, founded by Billy Graham for a readership of evangelicals — believers who are “born again.” Still, considering humans’ abiding interest in enjoying life on Earth — as Kenny Chesney put it, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to go now” — a little more fuss about healings and resurrections would seem in order. Especially since, as the article noted, a religious studies professor at Indiana University, Candy Gunther Brown, had gone to the trouble of performing a study of Mozambicans cured by Baker via the laying-on of hands and concluded that they did indeed show statistically significant improvements in hearing and vision.
Funding for Brown’s project, “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique,” was provided by, among other institutions, a nonprofit headquartered in rented offices in a nondescript building just off the Schuylkill Expressway in West Conshohocken: the John Templeton Foundation. It’s named for its founder, Sir John Templeton, who grew up in, of all places, Tennessee and in the course of his remarkable life made a killing on Wall Street; took up residence in the Bahamas for tax purposes; was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and became pals with her husband, Prince Philip; and devoted his fortune to his vision of utilizing scientific methods and rigor to explore “the extent of and the meaning of our spiritual selves and our relationship to the Creator God of the Universe.” He died in 2008, but his dream lives on, faithfully tended by family members, a board of trustees, and 57 employees who continue to bestow the foundation’s largesse on a dazzling array of scientific and quasi-scientific endeavors.
The Templeton Foundation is so wealthy that it’s faced accusations its funding — it’s given away more than a billion and a half dollars in its lifetime — is skewing the direction of entire departments at universities by favoring research it hopes will further its aims, in particular beleaguered humanities programs that can’t readily find funding from other sources. Recipients of its many, many grants include the University of Pennsylvania (Templeton dollars helped found its Positive Psychology Center), Union Theological Seminary, Smith College, and the University of Oxford (where Templeton endowed a business college in 1983). That’s pretty august company. Meantime, we’re living in an era when conflicts between science and religion have never been more pitched, what with Donald Trump complaining that Christianity is “under siege” and pooh-poohing scientific advice on how best to deal with COVID-19.
Studies on the efficacy of prayer may seem as obscure today as medieval quibbles over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But as complications from COVID erode America’s higher education system, the foundation’s funding has taken on new resonance. Which, oddly, has universities and researchers asking exactly the sorts of “big questions” Sir John enjoyed contemplating: What is science, anyway? Is our modern reliance on it misplaced? Can attributes like love and truth and beauty be quantified? And are advances in cosmology — the study of the origins of the universe — bringing us ever closer to understanding God?
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The facts of Sir John Templeton’s life have been laid out many times, not least of all by Sir John Templeton, who was the author of more than a dozen books, most of which provide the same diet of well-digested details and are vanity publications of the Templeton Press. He was born in 1912 in Winchester, Tennessee; his grandfather, John Wiley Templeton, was a Confederate surgeon during the Civil War. Sir John’s dad, Harvey, was a lawyer; his mother, Vella, was an ardent gardener and adventurer — she frequently set out on months-long trips with young John and his older brother, Harvey — who was a follower of the Unity School of Christianity, an outgrowth of the Transcendental movement founded at the turn of the 20th century. Unity stresses a “positive, practical Christianity” emphasizing self-improvement, prosperity, and the curing of illness via prayer. (Modern-day adherents have ranged from jazz singer Della Reese and poet Maya Angelou to actress Betty White and Famous Amos cookie king Wally Amos.) As the movement’s co-founder, Charles Fillmore, once explained, “God is Spirit, infinite Mind, the immanent force and intelligence everywhere manifest in nature.” It’s woolly like that.
John Templeton aboard a ship in 1934 en route to his Rhodes Scholarship. Courtesy Sir John Templeton Foundation
Sir John had a small-town upbringing — the stories he told about it emphasized his entrepreneurial zeal, including a bean-growing business he started at age four — before following Harvey to Yale, where he became Mr. All-Everything, including president of Phi Beta Kappa and a member of the Elihu secret society, while helping to pay his tuition by winning at poker. He then headed to England as a Rhodes Scholar, after which he toured 35 countries (one stop was Hitler’s 1936 Olympics) for seven months on a grand total of 90 pounds — his parents always emphasized thrift — before settling in New York for a career in finance.
Sir John’s start to becoming what Money magazine would one day call “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century” was his decision, after Hitler invaded Poland, to take $10,000 in borrowed money and invest $100 in each of 104 companies on the New York Stock Exchange, all selling for less than a dollar per share. When World War II cranked the economy up again, he made a mint. One of the first U.S. investors to seek out foreign stocks, especially those of Japanese companies, he was an innovator in globally diverse mutual funds. (One of the credos he lived by was Baron Rothschild’s “Buy when there’s blood in the streets.”) One true believer’s investment of 100,000 Canadian dollars in the Templeton Growth Fund at its 1954 founding, with distributions reinvested, famously grew to $37 million Canadian by 1996 — “believed to be the world’s greatest mutual investment fund performance for that time period,” according to Templeton’s biography.
In the mid-1960s, Sir John gave up his U.S. citizenship to avoid paying $100 million in taxes and moved to the Bahamas. Twice wed — his first wife died in a motor-bike accident after 14 years of marriage and three kids — he was a member of the Presbyterian Church all his life and served on the board of Princeton Theological Seminary for 42 years. His death in 2008 from pneumonia, at age 95, prompted glowing obituaries in nearly every major newspaper in the world.
Sir John in an undated file photo. Photograph by Ron Bull/Toronto Star/Getty Images
Today, a dozen years later, Sir John is probably best known for establishing the Templeton Prize. Originally called the “Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion” (“progress” was reportedly Sir John’s favorite word) and then, from 2002 to 2008, the “Templeton Prize Toward Progress or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities,” it was for many years presented by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. (Sir John’s knighthood was granted in 1987 in gratitude for his philanthropy.) The first recipient, in 1973, was Mother Teresa; others have included Billy Graham (1982), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1983), reformed Nixon trickster Charles Colson (1993), the Dalai Lama (2012), Desmond Tutu (2013), King Abdullah II of Jordan (2018), and, this year, geneticist Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project and head of the National Institutes of Health under both presidents Obama and Trump. As Sir John dictated, the value of the prize is adjusted annually so that it’s worth more than the Nobel Prizes, which he considered deficient for ignoring religion. In Francis Collins’s case, that amounted to $1.3 million.
Impressive though the Templeton Prize may be, a more far-reaching legacy is the Templeton Foundation, created in 1987. By all accounts, Sir John was exceedingly bright and irrepressibly curious. His great wealth bought him access to great thinkers, and his mother’s Unity background left him open to the notion that there is no single path to knowing God. He was more than willing to search the scriptures of all the world’s religions for wisdom and guidance, and his foundation’s board has been peppered with believers of many persuasions. One of his books, Worldwide Laws of Life, lays out a list of 200 “spiritual principles” drawn from sources as diverse as the Book of Matthew (“Love thy neighbor as thyself”), Booker T. Washington (“I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him”), Socrates (“The unexamined life is not worth living”), songwriter Johnny Mercer (“Accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative”), the Buddha (“All that we are is the result of what we have thought”), Mike Ditka (“You never really lose until you stop trying”), and, um, Sir John Templeton (“Nothing is interesting if you are not interested”).
John “Jack” Templeton Jr., center, at Buckingham Palace in 2002 as Prince Philip, right, presents the Templeton Prize to physicist and priest John C. Polkinghorne. Photograph by PA Images/Getty Images
Grants from the foundation have been similarly wide-reaching. Examples from the appendix of Sir John’s biography include a Duke University study on “Do Religious People Live Longer?”; one at Virginia Commonwealth University on the role of “family spiritual values” in alcohol use in adolescents and young adults; a project with the Center for Jewish and Christian Values to provide guidance on how public schools might include religious discussions in the classroom; various college and high-school essay contests on Sir John’s “Laws of Life”; and funding for a course, offered via Harvard Medical School’s Department of Continuing Education, called “Spirituality and Healing in Medicine.” This last is particularly interesting. According to the foundation’s 2012 annual report, in 1992, only three medical schools in America offered courses on spirituality and health; by 2005, thanks at least partly to liberal Templeton seeding, more than 100 of 141 accredited schools did. The sheer size of the foundation’s endowment — it has $3.3 billion in assets — has made it a blunt force in its spiritual quest.
Out of his diverse interests, Sir John managed to cobble together a philosophy he called “humility theology,” the basic thrust of which can be summarized thusly: God is infinite and unknowable. In the modern world, science and technology have been proceeding at a rapid clip, but theology has remained mired in medieval mud, leading to its eclipse by secular pursuits. Templeton hoped to use his fortune to jump-start a theological revival that would seek spiritual knowledge using the empirical and statistical methods of science. He was, characteristically, splendidly optimistic. As he wrote in his book The Humble Approach: Scientists Discover God:
Egotism caused men to think that the stars and the sun revolved around them. … Egotism is still our worst enemy. In fact, things are still not what they seem. Only by becoming humble can we learn more. Forces still undreamed of are probably present around us and in us. And more revelations about God’s universe will probably be discovered in the next century than in all the millenniums before.
Or, as one of Sir John’s own Worldwide Laws of Life puts it: “Humility leads to prayer as well as progress and brings you in tune with the Infinite.”
Through the years, Templeton dollars have been funneled into a host of initiatives with fuzzy-sounding names and, often, fuzzy imperatives: the Foundational Questions Institute, the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, the International Center for the Integration of Health and Spirituality, the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative, and the Flame of Love Project, created to establish “a new interdisciplinary science of ‘Godly Love.’” It was this last effort, with a seeding Templeton grant of $2.3 million, that funded Candy Gunther Brown’s study on intercessory prayer, in which believers pray for others. It is only one project in the field of “prayer studies”; others have sought to evaluate “distant intercessory healing” and even retroactive intercessory prayer, in which contemporary supplicants sought to affect the recovery of patients in the past. The results of prayer studies overall have been … mixed. Many have shown no effect or even, in the case of intercessory prayer, a negative health effect. (Researchers have postulated this might be due to subjects thinking, “Oh dear, I must really be sick if they’re asking other people to pray for me,” increasing their anxiety, which might then affect their health.) Others have shown slight outcome improvements. A meta-review of such studies concluded that their methodology and design were often so flawed that they were meritless. That seems to have been the case with Brown’s study, which one skeptic, current Google director of research Peter Norvig, termed “instructive because it achieves a rare pentafecta, triggering all five of the most important experiment design warning signs,” including having too few subjects enrolled and a lack of double-blinding and random controls. Norvig called it “a perfect example of how not to do experiment design.”
Here’s where we get to the heart of the Templeton conundrum. The foundation apparently has always duly and truthfully reported the results of the research it supports, even when those results don’t seem to favor godliness — by, say, showing that religious people don’t live longer. Similarly, while the foundation’s conferences and lecture series have featured religious thinkers like Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris and now-deceased quantum physicist Charles Townes, they also include skeptics and critics. (The foundation once supported research on and discussion about intelligent design but backed off when the lack of valid research proposals proved “disillusioning.”) The foundation’s director of strategic communication, Benjamin Carlson, points out that recent grants have funded projects “to engage with science” in madrasas, synagogues, seminaries and monasteries.
Grant-takers insist they’re under no pressure from the foundation to massage their research or opinions to qualify for funding. Oxford University’s famed anti-religion crusader, Richard Dawkins, has gibed that the Templeton Prize is usually awarded to “a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion,” but that didn’t stop him from accepting Templeton money to appear at an event. And while eminences like cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, physicist Sean Carroll, and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci have publicly spoken out about the corruptive influence of Templeton’s muddling of science and religion, plenty of others are happy to use its funding to further their research. Each year, according to Carlson, the foundation provides more than $100 million in grants.
The humanities are in retreat on college campuses these days; everyone’s emphasizing STEM, coding, programming, engineering — practical pursuits that are worth student (and parental) investment of $50,000 a year and up. Among colleges that have jettisoned their philosophy departments in the past few years: England’s Middlesex University, Claremont Graduate University, Elmira College, and, in May, Liberty University (whose website notes the Templeton Foundation as a funder). Heather Templeton Dill, Sir John’s granddaughter and the current president of the foundation, hopes its work can forestall this erosion. “The great argument for the humanities is that by asking us to grasp the literature, the history, and the great ideas of human civilizations in all their breadth and variety,” she writes in emailed responses to a set of questions, “it makes us stretch, and might even help us become more compassionate and wise.” She calls that “a motivating inspiration” behind the foundation’s work: “By asking philosophers to speak with physicists, or encouraging evolutionary biologists to learn from cultural historians and vice versa, we hope to enrich not only these fields, but human knowledge more broadly. Sometimes the most innovative solutions come from people who bring an outside perspective to a problem.”
Fierce debates erupt every few years about the pros and cons of accepting Templeton’s millions, though they tend to take place in the comments sections of specialized publications like the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. A 2013 article in the latter took note of a Facebook posting by Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Rutgers, that set off a Templeton uproar. Stanley wrote that Templeton money was sure to produce “a huge number of papers and books in our field taking a religious perspective,” adding, “This is not why I entered philosophy, and it is incompatible with my conception of its role in the university.” He vowed never to accept Templeton money or appear at Templeton-funded conferences, noting, “We know from social science that people tend to respond to the agendas of their funders in unconscious ways.” Dennett, who once engaged in a debate with astrologers, has expressed his dismay that the mere fact of his doing so made astrology seem more respectable to audience members. And he once told the Washington Post regarding Templeton’s conflation of science and theology, “I compare it to an art collector who spends a lot of money on excellent art and then has a show with a few pieces by his brother. It’s trying to elevate the prestige of his brother by having them in the same room with a Cézanne and a Monet.” Ouch.
Then again, consider the work of Anjan Chatterjee, a professor of neurology at Penn Med and director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. In August, when I tele-interviewed him, Chatterjee was about to embark on a brand-new $240,000 grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. (“They came to me,” Chatterjee says. “I didn’t know what to think or make of it.”) He admits his final grant proposal, titled “The Semantic Space of Aesthetic Cognitivism,” is “a bit jargony”:
The aim of this project is to establish a taxonomy that makes explicit concepts that are both relevant to aesthetic cognitivism (AC) and useful for scientific study.
Or, as he explains in more down-to-earth language, “It’s organized around the philosophical concept of aesthetic cognition — the notion that engaging with art enhances our understanding.” Uh — our understanding of what? “The perfect question!” he beams. “How do we operationalize these terms so that we can conduct scientific research on them? What kind of ‘art’? What are we understanding? What does it mean to be transformed by art — to be elevated?” In other words, before research can even begin, scientists need a common system of scientific classification, to be sure they’re talking about the same things.
Chatterjee gives as an example the concepts of “the sublime” and “awe”: “If you ask the average Joe and John on the street, they might not make the fine distinctions between them that the experts do.” With his Templeton grant, Chatterjee plans to draw together a multidisciplinary panel of experts to define the concepts and words that are important to the work — himself as a neuroscientist, philosophers, theologians, psychologists, art historians … Once they’ve settled on the concepts that are important, Chatterjee will convene another panel of experts to decide what artworks tap into those concepts: “The goal is to have a set of stimuli — the artworks — normed by the taxonomy we’ve set out.”
It sounds a little … woolly. Across time and space, on my computer screen, Chatterjee shrugs a bit. “I’m thinking of writing a book,” he says. “I want to address a certain common view that aesthetics are frivolous. That they’re fundamentally impractical in all sorts of ways. Aesthetics are embedded in all of our lives. What does our environment look like? How do we react to it? What are our values? This isn’t about some high-end traveling exhibit at the Museum of Art. Aesthetics symbolize how our culture views itself — our experience of who we are.” Consider the recent contretemps in our city over the Rizzo mural and the Christopher Columbus statue. Those are works of art, Chatterjee points out — art so fraught with meaning that we’re willing to fight in the streets over it.
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In case you’re wondering how the Templeton Foundation wound up in West Conshohocken, it was a matter of proximity. In 1995, Sir John’s eldest son, John Jr., known as Jack, retired from his job as a pediatric surgeon and director of trauma at Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania to join the foundation; he then took over as president in the early 2000s. The foundation actually had its start in a room above the garage at the family’s Bryn Mawr home; by that time, Sir John was ensconced in his Bahamian tax shelter and contributing ideas and opinions via frequent faxes. (Jack’s wife, Josephine “Pina” Templeton, an anesthesiologist at CHOP, died last year.)
Two of Sir John’s children, as it happens, became physicians. Son Christopher, who died earlier this year, was a farmer, but Sir John’s only daughter, Anne, was a surgeon; she died in 2004. (Anne was married to former Wyoming state senator Gail Zimmerman; in a typical Templeton rabbit hole, there’s an online interview with Zimmerman that shows him in a “trophy room” lined with the mounted heads and pelts of big-game animals he’s killed as he discusses the exhilaration of “the moment of taking a life.”) Jack died of brain cancer in 2015, whereupon Dill, a former teacher at her alma mater, Delaware County Christian School in Newtown Square, became president. (Her only sibling, Jennifer, a social worker with a Penn master’s degree in environmental studies, is on the board.) Last year, the foundation signed an extension of its lease at 300 Conshohocken State Road that downsized its offices by 25,000 square feet. Dill’s husband, Jeffrey — they have four sons — is a sociology professor at Eastern University’s Templeton Honors College, where study centers on the “Great Books.”
It was during Jack’s stint as head of the foundation that much of the controversy surrounding the organization sprang up. If his father’s theology was fuzzy, resting on those 200 Laws of Life that Slate writer David Plotz once described as “platitudes of high banality,” Jack’s was crystal clear: He was an evangelical Christian who put his own considerable fortune behind his beliefs. He poured $900,000 into the campaign to pass the Prop 8 initiative to countermand California’s law allowing gay marriage, was a major funder of the Red White & Blue PAC that supported Rick Santorum’s 2012 presidential campaign, and gave $100,000 to the American Crossroads PAC founded by Karl Rove. Under his leadership, the foundation contributed liberally to right-wing think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. In 2004, the Templeton Freedom Awards were created, administered by what was formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (it’s now the Atlas Network), a nonprofit supporting free-market approaches to eliminating poverty and noted for its refutation of climate change and defense of the tobacco industry. Jack also provided the seed money for Let Freedom Ring, an organization founded by former Chester County commissioner Colin Hanna to counter what he and Jack saw as the pernicious political influence of George Soros’s fortune. And the foundation-funded Epiphany Prize, awarded to movies and TV shows that are “wholesome, spiritually uplifting, inspirational, redemptive and moral,” was presented in 2005 to Mel Gibson’s divisive and anti-Semitic film The Passion of the Christ. (Another winner: the CBS series Touched by an Angel.)
Understandably, there was trepidation about what impact Jack’s political views would have on the foundation. But the major shift apparently was organizational. Sir John’s scattershot bevy of pursuits was winnowed down into what the foundation now bills as “Big Questions,” with more emphasis on psychology, philosophy and physics than theology. Communications director Carlson points out such recent Templeton-supported projects as Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau’s exoplanet discoveries and the Black Hole Initiative.
I wanted to visit Templeton Foundation headquarters — Sir John was notoriously averse to ostentation — and interview members of its staff, but COVID precluded that. Instead, Carlson and Dill answer questions via email. “My father worked very hard to carry out the vision set out by his father,” Dill replies to a question regarding the foundation’s future direction, “and he inspired me to strive to do the same — that is, to accelerate discovery and inspire curiosity on the deep questions of meaning, existence, and purpose in our world.”
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If you read enough about the work of the Templeton Foundation, you develop a sort of sixth sense for when it’s behind new research findings. Announcements and headlines are frequently posed in the form of questions: “Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?” “Is time really nonexistent?” In the spirit of Unity, they tend to accentuate the positive: “Yes, gratitude really does help you live a better life (and be a better person).” They’re often speculative: “How the geometry of ancient habitats may have influenced human brain development.” (I mean, who really knows?) Keywords include consciousness, the cosmos, quantum physics, God, free will, grit (or the more elegant “resilience”), character and, lately, genius, which the foundation has begun cultivating in young people via a mentoring program linking high-school kids with researchers and scientists through the Templeton-funded World Science Festival.
Then again, that footnotes revealing Templeton funding can be found attached to so many different research efforts may just be proof that the foundation’s grants are as ubiquitous as critics say. This concern may become more urgent as some Templeton-funded “scientific” findings crumble under further study. Penn’s Positive Psychology Center has seen doubt thrown on professor Angela Duckworth’s attention-garnering (and MacArthur Fellowship-earning) thesis on the importance of “grit” — a new meta-analysis says its effects are negligible compared to those of intelligence — and on positive thinking itself, which a new study says leads to more misery than having a realistic outlook does. Carlson is unperturbed by the suggestion that foundation-funded research is being upended: “Science makes progress gradually by pressure-testing ideas through accumulated experiments and evidence,” he writes.
It’s only fair to note that like any worthy source of controversy, the Templeton Foundation has been slammed from both sides. Bible literalists decry Sir John’s pantheism and the foundation’s support of Francis Collins’s BioLogos, a Christian think tank that promotes evolution (as opposed to creationism or intelligent design). On the other hand, the now-deceased physicist Freeman Dyson, the 2000 recipient of the Templeton Prize, riled scientists by dismissing the dangers of climate change and even arguing that its effects might prove salubrious, with excess carbon benefiting the growth of plants.
The foundation has been slammed from both sides: Bible literalists decry Sir John’s pantheism, while one Templeton Prize winner riled critics by dismissing the dangers of climate change.
Anjan Chatterjee, for one, doesn’t care to get drawn into discussions of God. “Neuroscientists have little to say about the veracity of religion,” he tells me. “We can say something about the experience of religion, though. If you are particularly religious-minded, I can say something about what your experience is like.” He suggests substituting “spirituality” for “religion”: “More people are comfortable with that. It’s the study of experiences you have that are elevating, that make us feel part of something larger — whether that’s climate change or a communal response to art.” The foundation, he notes, is placing no constraints on him. And it’s “one of the few places one can apply for funding to answer these kinds of questions. If there are concerns that Templeton might skew the direction of research, the solution is not to have them fund less work; it’s to find more funding sources for the work. We all think diversity is a good thing.”
Dill echoes this in her replies: “We wish that there were more funding for all the fields we support. … One thing we hear from the people we support is how important it is to them that we give grants in underfunded areas — that we try to prioritize projects that would not be funded by others, so we can make a difference.”
All these concerns are highfalutin matters, far above the pay grade of average Joes and Johns like you and me, who are just struggling to keep our heads above water in this year of COVID and economic upheaval and political chaos. It’s hard not to contemplate what the Templeton Foundation’s billions could do to better this world if applied to more practical charity, like, say, feeding Syrian refugees, or even unemployed Americans. But Sir John was adamant that he didn’t want his money used for such mundane purposes; there were, he said, sufficient resources devoted to them already. His eyes were on a higher prize.
Heather Templeton Dill won’t apologize for that. “As an organization,” she writes, “the mission that we are asked to carry out is addressed to a specific set of needs. Some might call it a spiritual hunger, or a crisis of meaning and purpose. It’s an uncommon mission, and one that we feel has a role to play in today’s world. Our hope, our dream as an institution, is to help people flourish and find joy by bringing the tools of science to bear on profound questions that at one point or another touch all of us.”
Hey, there’s no doubt that higher prizes are seductive. They provide a distraction from more mundane matters. They can start you thinking in new and different ways. For example, the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions got me wondering: If God is truly infinite, then no matter how much you learn about Him (or Her, or It, or They) through experiments and science, you never actually get any closer to knowing Him (or Her, or It, or They) — right? Isn’t that what “infinity” is all about?
Then again, as Nathan Schneider, author of the book God in Proof: The Story of a Search From the Ancients to the Internet, once wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Templeton’s Big Questions are “the kinds of out-there topics that make philosophy seem bold and exciting to a college freshman but can feel thoroughly desiccated after a few years in graduate school.” We’re all in grad school these days. No wonder philosophy departments are closing. I think I’ll go make myself a sandwich now.
Published as “Proving His Religion” in the October 2020 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
SASKATOON —
When Adam Pottle’s children’s book, The Most Awesome Character in the World, came out last week, he said he was shocked to see the illustrations that were used and is now urging people not to buy it.
"Because the way the book has been illustrated, it contains an illustration depicting a racist stereotype, specifically an Asian stereotype," Pottle told CTV News in an interview.
"I don’t want any readers to feel alienated while they’re reading the book — that’s not what the book is about, that’s not what I’m about as a person.”
Pottle was born deaf and as a child, noticed there weren’t many books catered to him and his experiences. That’s why he decided to make a difference by writing a book for deaf kids.
He began writing the book three years ago after publishing company Reycraft Books contacted him and expressed interest in his work as a deaf author.
Pottle said he submitted a list to the company containing deaf illustrators he wanted to work on his book, but he said the company went in another direction and chose a non-deaf illustrator.
As the book was getting closer to being published, Pottle said that communication with the publisher became very rare, and that he didn’t even see the finished book until a review was already written about it.
"Typically with all the books that I have published previously, I had seen galleys of proof, which is what the pages look like before they’re sent to the printer," Pottle said.
"With this children’s book, I did not receive that, I actually did not receive any character sketches or any pictures of what the illustrations inside the book looked like until the book had been sent out to reviewers and librarians."
<img alt="Adam Pottle book" src="/polopoly_fs/1.5141119!/httpImage/image.jpeg_gen/derivatives/landscape_960/image.jpeg"/>
The illustration in question is one that depicts an Asian girl wearing a kimono with her hair styled into two buns.
"The book was originally intended to celebrate imagination and creativity and beauty, and was also supposed to celebrate the beauty of deaf culture," Pottle said.
"But we cannot celebrate one culture at the expense of another. It was meant to be something we can celebrate as a whole, celebrate together, but with the way the book is illustrated, unfortunately prevented me from doing that.”
Pottle decided to work with a sensitivity reader to get a better understanding of how the illustrations could be seen as racist stereotypes.
After coming to the realization that he did not want the book on shelves, he reached out to his publisher, who refused to change the illustrations or pull the book.
"I was looking forward to sharing this book with the world, and now that I can’t, I feel robbed, I feel like I’ve been robbed of my own story, and it’s very disturbing for me," Pottle told CTV News.
Pottle is now working to get people to not buy the book and has received help from stores such as Barnes & Noble, McNally Robinson, Powell’s and Another Story, who have agreed to take it off the shelves.
Pottle said that despite being initially discouraged, he won’t let it keep him from his work.
He said he has completed another children’s book with several other projects also on the way.
CTV News reached out to Reycraft Books but has yet to hear back.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The Mexican government has formally asked Pope Francis for the temporary return of several ancient indigenous manuscripts held in the Vatican library ahead of next year’s 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The request to allow the texts to be exhibited in Mexico was made in a two-page letter addressed to Pope Francis and posted on President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s Twitter page on Saturday but dated Oct. 2.
It was delivered to the pope by Lopez Obrador’s wife, Beatriz Gutierrez Muller, who met with him at the Vatican following a meeting she had on Friday with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.
One of the three codicies, or books, requested is the Codex Borgia, an especially colorful screen-fold book spread across dozens of pages that depicts gods and rituals from ancient central Mexico.
It is one of the best-preserved examples of pre-conquest Aztec-style writing that exists, after Catholic authorities in colonial-era Mexico dismissed such codicies as the work of the devil and ordered hundreds or even thousands of them burned in the decades following the 1521 conquest.
In the letter, Lopez Obrador requests the Vatican return the Codex Borgia, two other ancient codicies as well as its maps of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan for a one-year loan in 2021.
The nationalist president is planning a series of events to commemorate the anniversary next year. He also reiterated his request that the Catholic Church, as well as reigning Spanish King Philip VI, apologize for atrocities that were committed following the conquest of Mexico, which Lopez Obrador said would mark an “act of historic contrition.”
The Vatican has not yet responded to the request, but its museums and archives have in the past lent out various manuscripts and works of art after similar requests from other countries.
Reporting by David Alire Garcia in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Philip Pullella in Rome; Editing by Chris Reese
… books following the Black Lives Matter movement.
“When I delivered the book … pulled (a book) out and posed,” Books for Newborns … 11% of children’s books starred Black characters, … — yielded counteractive results. Publishers will include people of color …
GW425, South Africa, Cape Town, 1990: Nelson Mandela with Winnie Mandela as he is released from Victor Vester prison. ANC – African National Congress African leaders, icons, public figures, famous people, goverment, political. ( Photo: Graeme Williams/South Photographs )
The shattering personal cost of political currents on the tempestuous but enduring love affair between Nelson and Winnie Mandela, two of the world’s most prominent 20th–century revolutionaries, has been further highlighted in two works on the late South African statesman.
First published in Daily Maverick 168
Let’s begin with the first. It is a description of the last hours in the life of Nelson Mandela as set out by Vejay Ramlakan, head of Mandela’s medical team, in his book Mandela’s Last Years, published in 2017 and withdrawn at the threat of legal action.
Ramlakan, who died in August 2020, describes how, apart from his medical team, only Winnie Mandela remained at her former husband’s bedside when the monitors recording Mandela’s fading life source finally fell silent at 21.48 on 5 December 2013.
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It was Winnie who held his hand as her great love exhaled his last breath, and who sobbed “as she nestled her head beside Madiba’s still body”, according to Ramlakan.
The second revelation is more searing. It appears in a surveilled conversation between Mandela, his daughter Zenani and her husband Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini on 1 September 1989 in the house at Victor Verster Prison, Paarl, to which Mandela had been transferred in 1988. Zenani and Muzi lived in the US and visited Mandela on a trip to South Africa. According to a letter accompanying the transcript of the conversation, Mandela had been keen to remove Zindzi from the “corrupting influence” of her mother, Winnie. The conversation is related in Prisoner 913 – The Release of Nelson Mandela by Riaan De Villiers and historian Jan–Ad Stemmet, based on the “private archive” of former apartheid justice minister Kobie Coetsee, who played a role in the National Party’s bids to talk to the ANC about a negotiated settlement for South Africa.
The excavation of this part of Coetsee’s archive offers significant insights into the behind–the–scenes delicate dance between PW Botha, the Nationalist government, its senior leaders, Mandela, other incarcerated senior leaders and ANC leadership in exile.
But for now what is relevant is the conversation between a father and his daughter and her husband about his wife, in the heat of a brutal and, at times, covert, civil war in South Africa in the mid- to late 1980s.
Winnie had risen as a leader in her own right, a thorn in the side of the apartheid state; the “other” Mandela who became one of the global faces of the anti–apartheid movement. That she was targeted by agents of the state using dirty tricks and that her life was violently disrupted in every way is part of the physical, emotional and mental landscape Winnie Mandela needed to navigate.
By the time Zenani visited her father in jail in 1989, Winnie had spent 491 days in solitary confinement. There she was beaten and tortured, as recorded in her harrowing biography, 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69. Later she was “banned” and banished with her two daughters to Brandfort, Free State, before being drawn into the resistance to apartheid in the 1980s.
Nelson Mandela had been a prisoner for 27 years when Zenani visited in 1989. To the Nationalist government he was Prisoner 913.
It is in this recorded conversation that Mandela reveals an apparently long–held belief that it was Winnie who had betrayed him and disclosed his location before his arrest in 1962. It is a shattering charge.
We learn that author, activist and journalist Mary Benson provided information to Mandela in 1962, when he visited her in London, that Winnie had been involved in an extramarital affair while Mandela had been on the run, receiving training in Africa before heading to London.
On his return, he was arrested.
Somewhere between 1962 and 1989, Mandela believed that because of these affairs his whereabouts in South Africa became known and he was arrested at a road block in Howick in August 1962. In the conversation, Mandela is recorded as raising this belief. He knew he was being monitored and his jailers transcribed, keeping records and hand–written notes of each conversation.
De Villiers and Stemmet reveal this conversation was marked “confidential” and sent to Coetsee with a covering letter in which then Commissioner of Prisons, General Willie Willemse, sets out his opinions on what the conversation was about and what it might mean.
“Herewith a significant document which airs in some detail a large piece of bitterness, resentment and frustration which client has harboured towards his wife over many years and he can do little about it.”
Willemse opines that “it appears as if things are now moving to some sort of conclusion. She pays him no heed, for numerous reasons, among which certain physical needs must apparently not be discounted.”
The authors debated the ethics of making personal moments in Mandela’s life public, deciding he had made available an archive of personal material for public scrutiny.
The Mandela–Zenani conversation is retold by Willemse and other prison officials, so we do not hear Mandela in his own words, only how he was overheard.
“913 says he went underground. 913 says he was in London with Mary Benson, and she had told him that Winnie had attended a concert with a married man. 913 says she also had relationships with other men.”
“913 says it was clear to him that the police knew he was in Durban. 913 says Winnie had spoken about where he was. She (W) had told this to someone with whom she had an intimate relationship.”
This person, Mandela is reported as saying, had wanted both Winnie and Nelson arrested. Winnie, writes Willemse, “was arrested and she had said where 913’s comrades were”.
They divorced in 1996, but Winnie remained a presence in his life, visiting him in hospital later in life and after he had married Graça Machel.
It suggests Mandela had come to terms with a sense of deep betrayal.
Did he believe it? Certainly. Was it true? Probably. Winnie led her own life with her husband on the run. Did Mandela cast Winnie as having betrayed him politically? Mandela was silent on this.
In the end it was Winnie alone who was with Mandela when he died and who bade farewell to a life partner with whom she had shared South Africa in all its wretchedness and resilience.
As Sisonke Msimang writes in The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela, Winnie needs to be placed in a wider context to understand her legacy.
“The trick perhaps is not to debate whether Winnie was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (whatever those terms even mean). Removing her from the binaries to which women are often consigned rescues her from cliché, and spares us a tired and unproductive discussion.
“Winnie does not need to be either this or that. Instead, redeeming Winnie – thinking about what she teaches us – is to consider what she meant to our society and, in a particular way, how she embodied popular ideas of strength and resilience.”
The personal cost was great, the healing might never have come completely, but their love story stands as a testimony to the vulgarity and glory of the times. DM168
The conflict in the border region, located in the South Caucasus, has persisted for more than three decades, with the latest round of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan erupting over the past two weeks.
“The Secretary-General welcomes the agreement on a humanitarian ceasefire announced yesterday in Moscow by the Foreign Ministers of the Russian Federation, Azerbaijan and Armenia. He commends the Russian Federation for its mediation efforts”, according to a statement issued on Saturday by his Spokesperson.
Mr. Guterres called for the ceasefire to be respected, and for swift agreement on its specific parameters.
The Secretary-General also welcomed the commitment by Armenia and Azerbaijan to begin substantive negotiations under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), through its Minsk Group.
France, Russia and the United States chair the OSCE’s Minsk Process, which promotes peaceful resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
The UN chief further appealed to the international community to support the ceasefire agreement. He also urged countries to continue to encourage the sides to resolve their differences through peaceful means.
A European diplomat on Saturday said that the European Union is ready to send a mission to monitor the Palestinian electoral process, as well as support the Central Elections Commission.
During a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye in Ramallah city, Sven Kuhn Von Burgdsroff, the EU representative in Palestine, stressed that the EU supports holding the general elections in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Ishtaye praised the EU’s support for holding the general elections, calling on it to put pressure on Israel to permit holding the Palestinian elections in East Jerusalem. Enditem
(UN Photo/Tobin Jones)Young girls line up at a feeding center in Mogadishu, Somalia on 9 March 2017.
The World Council of Churches has joined the rest of the plant in welcoming the award of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize to the UN World Food Program, one of the world’s first responders in global crises.
“We express our gratitude and congratulations to the leadership and each staff member of the World Food Program,” said Rev. Ioan Sauca, WCC interim general secretary.
Oxafam released as report soon after say the threat of “COVID famines” and widespread extreme hunger is setting off every alarm bell within the international community, but so far sluggish funding is hampering humanitarian agencies’ efforts to deliver urgent assistance to people in need.
A new Oxfam analysis says that the international community’s response to global food insecurity has been dangerously inadequate.
The report, “Later Will Be Too Late”, is aimed at the Committee for World Food Security’s (CFS) high-level event today which is hoped to “keep food security and nutrition front-and-centere of the global sustainable development agenda.”
In Yemen, DRC, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Somalia – that is, five of the seven countries where severe hunger continues to increase – donors have so far given no money at all for the “COVID-related nutrition assistance” part of the UN’s $10.34 billion humanitarian appeal.
“This vital multilateral organization comprises many dedicated people, working in the remotest and most vulnerable regions of the world, affected by conflict, climate catastrophe and economic crises.”
The WFP’s spokesman Tomson Phiri was briefing journalists at the UN in Geneva when then announcement was made and said he views the Nobel Peace Prize as recognition of those struggling to prevent starvation around the world.
“This is a proud moment. The nomination in itself was enough. But to then go on and be named the Nobel Peace Prize winner is nothing short of a feat,” he said.
“This is an organization I have served for nine years. I have seen the extent to which the people who are dedicated across the globe go the extra mile,” said Phiri from Zimbabwe.
“Just before I moved to Geneva, I was based in South Sudan, where people would walk on foot to serve humanity. And it’s really a proud moment. I really feel honored to be a member of this,” he noted.
WFP WORKERS’ SACRIFICES
The first thing that came to his mind when he heard the announcement was, “I thought of all my colleagues whom I’ve worked with in many countries, all the sacrifices that they do sometimes under conditions of insecurity. I think this is for them.”
Earlier WFP’s U.S. Executive Director David Beasley tweeted on hearing of the award that he as “deeply humbled” by the announcement
“This is an incredible recognition of the dedication of the WFP family, working to end hunger everyday in 80 countries,” he wrote.
The United Nations estimates that the world recession caused by the COVID-19 crisis pushed an additional 83 to 132 million people into hunger with women and children usually those most at risk.
World Food Program received the award “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas. And for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict,” said Nobel committee chairman Berit Reiss-Andersen in speaking about the award.
The award announced in Oslo each year comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor or U.S.$1.1 million. It is courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
“We expect the Nobel Peace Prize to also help us going forward in not only shining the light on ourselves, but shining the light on the work that we do,” said Phiri.
The WFP’s contribution has become even more important in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the number of people facing acute food insecurity has nearly doubled to 265 million in 2020, from 135 million in 2019 said the WCC.
“People of faith, who are deeply rooted in their communities, are witness to the WFP’s heroic, sacrificial, and consistent responses to hunger, and have been privileged to serve as partners in many such contexts,” said Sauca.
He commented as faith communities were celebrating Churches’ Week of Action on Food, and many are emphasizing the moral imperative of addressing hunger and food insecurity.
However, in many places, funding allocated to support millions of vulnerable people needing lifesaving assistance is being reduced, due to the lack of resources or changed priorities.
“People of faith are committed to stand and act with the World Food Program, to protect people’s livelihoods, wellbeing and daily sustenance for all, especially for those experiencing the harsh reality of hunger, during these difficult times,” said Sauca. ”
We pray for solidarity among the world’s nations that such support is extended to the most marginalized communities within each society.”
During the Churches’ Week of Action on Food, being observed this year from Oct. 11-17, the WCC, Christian Conference of Asia, and Pacific Conference of Churches are inviting all people of goodwill to attend an online prayer service on October 16, World Food Day, in the different regions.
EU commissioner Mariya Gabriel has tested positive for Covid-19, she said yesterday, the first top Brussels official known to have caught the coronavirus.
Gabriel, the EU commissioner for research and innovation, had already announced on Monday that she would self-isolate after a member of her team tested positive for the virus.
“After a first negative #COVID19 test on Monday, my second one is positive,” said Gabriel, who is Bulgaria’s representative to the 27-member EU executive.
“I have been in self-isolation since Monday and continue staying at home, following the established regulations. Keep yourself healthy and stay safe!” she said.
The EU commission is headquartered in the Belgian capital of Brussels, which is currently one of the worst hit cities in Europe by the virus, along with Madrid and Paris.
The commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen on Monday briefly went into self-isolation after a close contact with a positive case, but her two tests came back negative.
Last month the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, was forced to postpone a European leaders’ summit for a week after a security guard in his team tested positive.
“My mum thought it was something spiritual from her side of the family. So they took me for prayers with the hope that I’d be cured of whatever was wrong,” he told CNN.
“My aunt advised my dad that they should take me to camp for prayers against evil spirits. I remember I was laying down on the ground and people were all over me praying. I didn’t want to react but the prayer wasn’t working,” Godwin said.
He added that when they realized on the way back home from camp that the expected healing didn’t happen, they brought in another pastor to pray for him at home.
In parts of Nigeria, it is common to attribute mental illness to supernatural factors such as witchcraft or repercussion for sins against God, according to a report in the Integrative Journal of Global Health.
At the time Godwin was 18 and he recalls being overwhelmed with fear, hearing voices and crying in distress.
“I felt irritation all over my body. The sound of the fan in the room made me paranoid, I felt like it was rolling too fast and it would cut off and kill me. There were so many confusing voices talking to me in my head,” he said.
Godwin’s family doctor eventually referred him to a specialist after hearing about his symptoms, “that’s when we went to the psychiatric hospital,” he said.
In his case, he was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and placed on drugs. “I was so relieved to know what was going on with me. My parents too were relieved knowing it was nothing spiritual,” he said.
Mental health illness is so poorly understood that in some cases, people with these conditions are chained and locked up in unorthodox facilities across the country including traditional healing and religious centers.
According to a 2019 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), people in these facilities are subjected to different forms of abuse including force-feeding them medicine and herbs and whipping as part of their treatment.
A 22-year-old woman who suffered a mental health crisis after her mother’s death told the human rights group that she had been held captive in a church for five months and denied food as part of a “spiritual cleanse” for her condition.
“I was tied with chains for three days straight so I could fast. For the three days, I had no food or water. It wasn’t my choice, but the pastor said it was good for me. Sometimes if they say I should fast and I drink water or take food, they (the church staff) put me on a chain,” she said in the report.
Similarly, an Islamic faith healer in northern Nigeria told HRW that he whips patients, leaving scars on their body, as a way to ‘treat’ them.
“If you are treating someone who is mentally unwell and he acts in a way that is causing a disturbance, you will have to treat him. Some of them might be talking to themselves or suffer from lack of sleep…. For some of them, getting enough sleep will help. For others, we need to whip them — once, twice … up to seven times,” he said.
Dr. Nancy Orjinta, a resident psychiatrist at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Lagos, said keeping people with mental illness in such facilities can impact their health negatively and damage their self-esteem.
“I have seen patients who were chained for months battle with self-esteem issues. Keeping someone locked up will not only harm them physically, but they will start to feel low and dehumanized too,” she said. She added that such conditions can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder caused by traumatic or distressing events.
Not enough psychiatrists
One of the reasons people visit religious and traditional healing centers for mental illness is a lack of understanding of mental health issues in the country, according to Dr. Orjinta.
Dr. Orjinta, told CNN that in many cases, Nigerians seek mental health care from unorthodox places, especially religious centers before considering going to the hospital.
However, delaying mental care by not immediately going to hospital prolongs the time the patient stays without appropriate care and “may create the worst outcome for the patient as they have more symptoms,” she said.
“There is still a stigma around mental illness. People perceive it in a negative light and as a result they don’t want to address it if they have symptoms. They want to keep on hiding it,” she explained.
She also added there aren’t enough mental health professionals in the country, making it difficult to access mental health care. For example, with a population of more than 200 million people, there are only 250 practicing psychiatrists in the country.
“There is a disproportionate sharing of mental health professionals, we don’t really have them in rural areas. And if someone lives in such areas without mental health care, of course, they will find alternatives for care like traditional healers or churches,” Dr. Orjinta explained.
Clampdown on rehabilitation centers
In recent times, authorities in Nigeria have rescued hundreds of people held under inhumane conditions in a clampdown on religious rehabilitation centers.
In September 2019, for example, police rescued more than 300 men and boys from an Islamic school in Kaduna, northern Nigeria. Some of them told the police they had been sexually abused and tortured by their teachers.
But mental health advocates say this is not enough.
Hauwa Ojeifo, a mental health activist and coach told CNN that Nigeria needs strong legislation that will set the standards for psychiatric treatment.
Data on mental health in the country is hard to come by, but an estimated 20-30% of the country’s population is suffering from mental disorders, according to a 2016 report in the Annals of Nigerian Medicine Journal.
And in 2017, a World Health Organization report found that Nigerians have the highest incidences of depression in Africa, with more than 7 million people in the country suffering from depression.
Ojeifo who is also the founder of She Writes Woman, a non-profit focused on providing mental health support in the country said she wants a mental health bill that will encourage mental awareness in the country to be passed.
She described Nigeria’s 1958 Lunacy Act, the current legislation governing mental health in the country as “outdated” and “discriminatory.”
Under the act, people with mental health conditions are allowed to be detained, even without the provision of medical treatment.
“I don’t just want any mental health bill to be passed. I am very particular about the content of the bill too. I want it to be respectful and accommodate the rights of persons with mental health conditions,” she told CNN.
Mental health awareness
Mental health awareness is needed to combat the widespread use of religious and traditional healing centers for mental care, according to Dr. Orjinta.
“The media needs to come in to report mental health without framing it in a bad or scary way like some do. The same way you can say someone has a problem with his leg, you should be able to say someone has a brain problem. It should be like every other illness,” she said.
She added that she is optimistic Nigeria will eventually get to a place where there is a minimal stigma regarding mental health. “It won’t be drastic and it will require many people like the government, media, and religious institutions putting in the effort, but I am optimistic.”
Godwin who was initially taken to church for prayers says care outside medical facilities should not be the first resort.
“There are drugs and medical facilities that can help with mental illness. I am not saying people who attribute it to spirituality are wrong, but I’d say there are other ways. Medicine is capable,” he said.
He added that in his case, he wished he was taken to the hospital first for quicker diagnosis, before being subjected to religious healing.
