Templeton Bookspark

“Thanksgiving can open the door to spiritual growth.”

This was one of the favorite sayings of the late Wall Street wizard, Sir John Templeton. With the Thanksgiving season upon us, now is the natural time to reflect on one’s blessings. Statistics show that this season also seems to inspire feelings of broader generosity as well.

Here at Templeton Press, we have a great new book out on this subject called Being Generous that explores it from historical, cultural, and even scientific perspectives. We are happy to see that we aren’t alone in celebrating generosity – indeed with the recent releases of other publishers’ books like The Art of Giving by Charles Bronfman and Jeffrey Solomon and 29 Gifts by Cami Walker, generosity appears to be something of a growing movement!

Keep an eye on our blog. We plan to share a mini series of Ted Malloch speaking on the virtue of generosity! It’s a must listen!

Dennis Whittle, CEO of GlobalGiving, recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on Theodore Roosevelt Malloch’s Being Generous. 

In the article Whittle states:

What makes it especially powerful is [Malloch's] description of his own journey from self-described narcissism to compassion: “It never came easy. I have always had a “meritocratic” outlook. That is…you get what you earn, what you deserve….I found it hard – often very hard – to give what I had earned away.”

Click here to read the full article.

Some of our staff returned from APHA today with news of a buzzing crowd in the exhibit hall. This is our first year exhibiting so we didn’t really know what to expect. Our goal was to increase our brand awareness among the public health crowd and introduce them to our professional titles on health and spirituality. As it turns out, this is a group that loves books! There’s a steady flow of people to the publishers row section of the hall and attendees have been responding well to our niche-y titles.

Stay tuned — we’ll have some pics up soon of our new booth display.

I just finished reading an interesting article in The New York Times titled License to Wonder. In it, the author talks about two misconceptions that students usually develop about science. But it was the author’s statement that ”there are plenty of (probably) apocryphal tales about what inspired a great discovery, but there are also many well-documented accounts of inspiration — or lack of it — in the history of science” that jumped out at me.

Recently, Templeton Press published From Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of All Time: In Their Own Words by Marco Bersanelli and Mario Gargantini.

From time to time, the diligent science student huddled over dense volumes of research findings and highly technical data will stumble upon a truly rare treasure: the author’s answer to the question of, “Why?” Why did the authors of these volumes commit themselves so ardently to life in the laboratory? What was it that motivated them to keep their eye to the microscope for years on end? Why did the world’s greatest scientists devote their lives to research—an endeavor where failure is the exponentially more likely outcome than success?

In From Galileo to Gell-Mann, Bersanelli and Gargantini have gathered the answers to these fascinating questions from over one hundred of the brightest scientific minds from our past and present. It is a goldmine of insight that previously could only be found hidden deep within thousands of scattershot pages of footnotes from out-of-print journals, rare books, and unpublished papers.

To learn more about this publication, click here.

Dr. Harold Koenig will speak at the upcoming pastoral care lecture at Moravian Theological Seminary on Thursday, October 29th. Koenig will address the topic of Religion, Spirituality and Health: The Spiritual Dimension of Patient Care.

Koenig is founder and co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University Medical Center, and has published extensively in the fields of mental health, geriatrics, and religion. His latest publication, Medicine, Religion and Health, was recently reviewed in Book Review Digest.

As someone who has felt that religious faith and a person’s spirituality influence people’s approach to illness and health, but who has been underwhelmed by the research with which I was familiar, this book is of great value.