rom its inception 11 years ago, the Templeton Press has increased its activities significantly. “We have published about 115 books,” says Laura Barrett, associate publisher at the Press. “We have 20 audio books that we’ve published and around 80 e-books.” Which are the bestsellers? “They would be Spirituality in Patient Care by Harold Koenig; Worldwide Laws of Life by Sir John Templeton, and The Hand of God edited by Michael Reagan. Passionaries by Barbara Metzler is another of our books that’s a big seller.”
A growing area for the Press is selling translations of its books into foreign languages. “In 2007 alone, we had 23 contracts for translations with foreign publishers,” says Barrett. She and her colleagues have been assiduous in attending the Frankfurt Book Fair every year and they have encountered increasing interest in their books. “And we’re continuing to translate books as well. Last year we translated Cosmic Impressions by Walter Thirring from the German into English.”
The French Science and Religion Series is a new project. The Press is working with the Interdisciplinary University of Paris to select six books on science and religion, both academic and more general trade and translate them into English. Publication is expected to start at the end of this year. Barrett is also excited about another grant, the 12-volume Templeton Science and Religion Series. The aim of the series is to keep the books, written by top-level scientists, under 200 pages and accessible for a general audience.
The Press manages two other large-scale grant projects. The first is the Gifford Lectures online database (www.giffordlectures.org), a comprehensive collection of books derived from the Gifford Lectures, a celebrated series of papers delivered for more than a century at Scotland’s four ancient universities on the topic of natural theology. Named after Lord Gifford, a nineteenth-century Scottish judge, the series has featured many distinguished lecturers, including Friedrich von Hügel, Iris Murdoch, and Albert Schweitzer.
“It has such rich content,” Barrett says of the database. “We’ve been working on this for the past three years, getting publishers’ permission to post at least a portion of a book they’ve published on a Gifford Lecture. We have completed about 80 percent of the biographies for all of the Gifford lecturers and summaries of the published books. The database is a great research tool and nowhere else is there one repository for all the Gifford Lectures information.”
The second grant is the Templeton Publishing Subsidy Program, which supports publishing projects advancing research and discovery in science and religion by subsidizing other publishers to produce relevant titles that would otherwise be too expensive for them to publish.
The priority subject area for the Press in the immediate future will be spirituality and health. The new website (www.spirit-health.org) will be launched in the fall of 2008. The new site is aimed at practitioners, chaplains, and healthcare professionals. In the fall of 2008, four new titles in this field will be published.
Barrett regards two books as the flagship titles of 2008: Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics by Vic Mansfield and The Big Questions in Science and Religion by Keith Ward, which features ten chapters each devoted to a big question. The book has already attracted a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The ethos of this work conforms precisely to what Barrett sees as the principal role of the Templeton Foundation Press, “The most important aspect of the work we do is to communicate ideas, through the books we publish, that align with the mission Sir John established for the Press.”
That mission is to promote and encourage progress in new spiritual information and research, provide analysis of the relationship between science and religion, support the application of the scientific method to spiritual concepts, and encourage character development and the enhancement of individual freedom.