Edited, with an Introduction, by Jeffery Paine
March 1, 2012
Smith (religion, emeritus, Syracuse Univ.) is perhaps known better in academic than in faith circles, but among scholars he is well known indeed. His work The Religions of Man (later re-titled The World's Religions) has long been the standard introduction to comparative religion for American students at both the undergraduate and graduate level. This collection brings together a diverse range of pieces--talks, occasional writings, memoirs, fugitive essays--on topics including philosophy, Shinto, and the author's old age. VERDICT Perhaps more for the completist than the casual reader, this scattershot but always interesting assemblage enlarges our understanding of one of today's most important scholars of religion. A must for most libraries and excellent for the student as well.
Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from March 1, 2012
Smith is as much participant in as scholar of the religions he has studied for a lifetime as the U.S.' foremost professor of comparative religion. He spent a decade each performing the mystical practices of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, and he is involved in Judaism, the only major religion he doesn't directly discuss in these essays, by dint of his daughter's marriage and conversion into that tradition. Yet he says that he is still the Methodist his missionary parents raised in China, where he was born in 1919. He is utterly sincere when he asserts, as the title of the third section of this book, I Never Met a Religion I Didn't Like. Less a theologian than a philosopher, he doesn't proselytize for any of his favorites or any combination of them. Instead, he revives cosmology, the branch of metaphysics that explores the nature of reality on the grandest of scales, and reasserts it against the positivism or materialismthe scientism, as he calls itthat predominates in modern and postmodern philosophy alike. So doing, he harks back to Aristotle and Hindu yogis and extols the perennial philosophy that Aldous Huxley influentially popularized in the mid-twentieth century. Although Smith writes as and even like an academic, he is never obscure, making this book the most excitingly eye-opening, if conceptually challenging, serious reading on religion many will feel they have ever encountered.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)