Philanthropist Sir John Templeton dies at 95

NASSAU, Bahamas — Sir John Templeton, the American-born investor and philanthropist who devoted his later life to funding the scientific study of religion, died July 8 at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas. He was 95. The John Templeton Foundation, his charitable organization, said the cause of death was pneumonia.

Once called “arguably the greatest global stock picker,” Templeton founded a prize for “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities” in 1972. He sought to make the million-dollar Templeton Prize the world’s largest annual award bestowed on an individual, always exceeding the monetary value of the Nobel Prize.

Today worth more than $1.6 million, the Templeton Prize has been awarded to Mother Teresa, theoretical physicist Paul Davies, Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and American evangelist Billy Graham.