In a statement Brian Hampton, Nelson's senior v-p and publisher of corporate brands, said the house still has "future projects under development" with the author and "will also continue to partner with John to keep ten years worth of life-changing material active in the marketplace." 

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In 1972, he established the world's largest annual award given to an individual, the £1,000,000 Templeton Prize, which is announced in New York and presented in London. The Prize is intended to recognize exemplary achievement in work related to life's spiritual dimension. Its monetary value always exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes—Templeton's way of underscoring his belief that advances in the spiritual domain are no less important than those in other areas of human endeavor.

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Revisionist history is always great fun, and never more so than when it is persuasively and cogently argued. Jenkins, the Penn State history professor whose book The Next Christendom made waves several years ago, argues that it's not exactly a new thing that Christianity is making terrific inroads in Asia and Africa. A thousand years ago, those continents were more Christian than Europe, and Asian Christianity in particular was the locus of tremendous innovations in mysticism, monasticism, theology and secular knowledge. The little-told story of Christianity's decline in those two continents—hastened by Mongol invasions, the rise of Islam and Buddhism, and internecine quarrels—is sensitively and imaginatively rendered. Jenkins sometimes challenges the assertions of other scholars, including Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels, but provides compelling evidence for his views. The book is marvelously accessible for the lay reader and replete with fascinating details to help personalize the ambitious sweep of global history Jenkins undertakes. This is an important counterweight to previous histories that have focused almost exclusively on Christianity in the West. (Nov.) 

In 1958, Kerouac published his groundbreaking novel The Dharma Bums, which met with great acclaim and has since been heralded as the opening salvo of an indigenous American Buddhism. This fall, Viking is repackaging that novel in a 50th-anniversary edition while also releasing Kerouac’s unsung and long-forgotten tale of the Buddha’s life, published in book form for the first time. The titular theme of “wake up” is rehearsed throughout Kerouac’s story of Prince Siddartha Gotama, who left an indolent but meaningless life of riches to embrace asceticism and enlightenment. Drawing on multiple sutras and accounts of the Buddha’s life, Kerouac focuses on Gotama’s renunciation of worldly things by repeating that trope with several other wealthy characters who forsake riches in favor of nirvana. The prose is as meandering as it is beautiful, with Kerouac’s Buddha spouting memorable sayings about sensation, illusion, emptiness and suffering. If there is an almost evangelistic zeal to this loose collection of axioms and Buddhist conversion stories, Kerouac at least states that openly: “The purpose is to convert,” he explains at the outset. (Sept. 22)