Ninian Smart

Smart became widely known outside the academy, at least in Britain, when he was editorial consultant for the major BBC television series, The Long Search (1977).

His defence of religious studies as a secular discipline helped the formation of departments in many public universities, especially in the United States.

Smart attended The Glasgow Academy before joining the military in 1945, serving until 1948, in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he learned Chinese (via Confucian texts) mainly at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and had his first extended contact with Sri Lankan Buddhism.

"[4] Leaving the army – as a captain – with a scholarship to Queen's College, University of Oxford, he reverted to his Glasgow major, classics and philosophy, mainly because Chinese and Oriental studies in those days had "pathetic curricula".

work and World Religions: A Dialogue (1960), Smart was a rising star in the newly developing field of Religious Studies, rather than in Theology, despite the name of the chair he occupied.

However, he was already involved in a consultative capacity in forming the first major department of Religious Studies at the new Lancaster, and found himself "cajoled from being adviser to being candidate" for the chair.

Proud of his Scottish identity, he often wore his kilt on campus at Santa Barbara, where he was renowned for riding his bicycle very slowly, for "his bow ties and the ever-present flower in his lapel, and most of all the twinkle in his eye.

"[2] At Lancaster he was respected by his students for being so accessible, for his willingness to engage his formidable intellect without pretension in informal debate over a pint in the bar.

[citation needed] Smart was also visiting professor at Varanasi in India, Yale, Wisconsin, Princeton, Queensland, and the respected Religious Studies department at Lampeter, in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

In the 1970s, he was involved in several initiatives in Britain to broaden the public religious education curriculum, previously purely Christian, to include the range of world religions.

At the time, it was only just beginning to earn academic recognition and Smart was a pivotal figure in this process and, as Cunningham comments, "it is difficult now to recall that the emergence of Religious Studies as a higher-education subject was then controversial.

Interested in Rudolf Otto's concept of the Holy as a key to understanding religion, he found this too restrictive, since Buddhism is non-theistic.

He then examined what he took as key religious concepts, such as revelation, faith, conversion and knowledge and analysed what these meant in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism without evaluating any belief in terms of truth or falsity.

He was consciously attempting to break out of captivity to Western modes of thought so that for example theism is not taken as an essential component of religion, thus such ideas as theophany or a single ultimate focus or sacrifice do not necessarily translate from the Christian into other religious contexts.

It need not be hostile to the type of committed approach pursued in theology "provided it is open, and does not artificially restrict understanding and choice".

At bottom, it has a place in the public or state sector because, as an aspect of human experience, it is also the study of people – of what they believe, why they believe and act as they do, both individually and within society.

[13]Smart is widely known for his seven-part definition of religion, or rather scheme of study; as this approach avoids the problem of defining altogether.

Smart divided these into "historical" and "para-historical," meaning by the latter those dimensions that take the investigation into the experience, or inner lives, or religious people.

The "historical" can be studied empirically, but the para-historical takes the student into the realm of belief and concepts and requires dialogue and participation.

[2] The Ninian Smart Annual Memorial Lecture, created in his honour, alternates between Lancaster and Santa Barbara.

Libushka was originally from Lake Como, Italy, where Smart regularly spent his summer vacations at his family home.

Ninian and Libushka were the first from the Western academy to have their marriage blessed by Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han in August 1992.