Smith, Huston

Huston is a preeminent religious scholar, celebrated practitioner, and revered teacher of world religions. He is the author of The Religions of Man (later revised as The World’s Religions), a classic introduction to the field for generations of college students. Formerly professor of philosophy at MIT and Syracuse University, Huston now lives in Berkeley and is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his many books are Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief and The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life. In his introduction to The World's Religions, Huston asks, "How does it all sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange, ethereal harmony? ... We cannot know. All we can do is try to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine. Such listening defines the purpose of this book." How does he decide what of all the cacophony to include? His criteria are "relevance to the modern mind" and "universality," and his interest in each religion is more concerned with its principles than its context. Therefore, he avoids cataloging the horrors and crimes of which religions have been accused, and he attempts to show each "at their best." Yet Huston is honest, writing: "It is about religion alive. It calls the soul to the highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit. The call is to confront reality." And by translating the voices of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, and Judaism, among others, he has amplified the divine call for generations of readers. Huston more recent book, Why Religion Matters, argues that there is an urgent need to restore the role of religion as the primary humanizing force for individuals and society. Weaving together insights from comparative religions, theology, philosophy, science, and history, along with examples drawn from current events and his own extraordinary personal experience, Huston offers both a convincing historical and social critique and a profound expression of hope for the spiritual condition of humanity. Despite the widespread belief that these are boom times for religion and spiritual awareness, Huston shows how our everyday worldview is instead dominated by a narrow scientism, materialism, and consumerism that push issues of morality, meaning, and truth to the outer margins of society and our lives. In fact, he finds that too much of what passes as religion these days is actually a privatized and ungrounded debasement of true religion. Huston’s writings are passionate, accessible, ambitious calls for a new appreciation of religion. Indeed, he is one of the very few people who is qualified to make this call. Huston Smith is the grand old man of religious scholarship. Raised by missionary parents in China, Smith went on to teach at world-class universities and and his World's Religions has long been the standard introductory textbook for college religion courses. His core belief "is the importance of the religious dimension of human life--in individuals, in societies, and in civilizations." Huston believes that the religious dimension of human life has been devalued by the rise of modern science: we have now reached a point at which "modern Westerners . . . forsaking clear thinking, have allowed ourselves to become so obsessed with life's material underpinnings that we have written science a blank check ... concerning what constitutes knowledge and justified belief." In candid, direct style, he describes the evolution of intellectual history from pre-modern to postmodern times, and the spiritual sensibilities that have been shunted "by our misreading of modern science." Huston avoids the folly of predicting the future, instead focusing on "features of the religious landscape that are invariant" and therefore may serve as "a map that can orient us, wherever the future may bring." When after practicing and writing about other religions Huston turns to Christianity, his life-long religion, one can feel his personal passion. "I have tried to describe a Christianity,” he writes, “which is fully compatible with everything we now know, and to indicate why Christians feel privileged to give their lives to it." With stories and personal anecdotes, Smith not only presents the basic beliefs and essential teachings of Christianity, but argues why religious belief matters in today's secular world. Though there is a wide variety of contemporary interpretations of Christianity -- many of them conflicting -- Smith cuts through these to describe Christianity's "Great Tradition," the common faith of the first millennium of believers, which is the trunk of the tree from which Christianity's many branches, twigs, and leaves have grown. This is not the exclusivist Christianity of strict fundamentalists, nor the liberal, watered-down Christianity practiced by many contemporary churchgoers. In exposing biblical literalism as unworkable as well as enumerating the mistakes of modern secularists, Smith presents the very soul of a real and substantive faith, one still relevant and, in his view, worth believing in. Huston reserves his harshest condemnation for secular modernity, which has stemmed from the misreading of science -- the logical error of assuming that "absence of evidence" of a scientific nature is "evidence of absence." These mistakes have all but banished faith in transcendence and the Divine from mainstream culture and pushed it to the margins. Though the situation is grave, these modern misapprehensions can be corrected, Huston believes, by reexamining the great tradition of Christianity's first millennium and reaping the lessons it holds for us today. This fresh examination of the Christian worldview, its history, and its major branches provides the deepest, most authentic vision of Christianity -- one that in Huston Smith’s grand worldview is both tolerant and substantial, traditional and relevant.