Full Description
Ninian Smart came to public prominence as the founding Professor of the first British university Department of Religious Studies in the late 1960s. His pioneering views on education in religion proved hugely influential at all levels, from primary schools to academic teaching and research. An unending string of publications, many of them accessible to the general public, sustained a reputation that became worldwide. Here, for the first time, a selection of Ninian Smart's wide-ranging writings is organised systematically under a set of categories which both comprehend and also illuminate his varied output over a career spanning half a century. The editor, John Shepherd, was Principal Lecturer in Religion and Philosophy at the University of Cumbria. He first met Smart as a postgraduate student, and recently helped establish the Ninian Smart Archive at the University of Lancaster.
Contents
Contents: Preface; Introduction: a critical analysis; Part I Autobiographical: Methods in my life. Part II Religious Experience and the Logic of Religious Discourse: The comparative logical analysis of religious doctrines; Empiricism and religions: Understanding religious experience. Part III Mystical Experience: Interpretation and mystical experience; The purification of consciousness and the negative path; What would Buddhaghosa have made of The Cloud of Unknowing?. Part IV Comparative Studies: Numen, Nirvana and the definition of religion; What is religion?; Theravada Buddhism and the definition of religion; The work of the Buddha and the work of Christ; The logos doctrine and Eastern beliefs; The comparative view of the person: East and West; Buddhism and the death of God; Types of religious liberation: an implicit critique of modern politics. Part V Religious Studies and Religious Education: Method and Theory in the Study of Religions: Religion as a discipline?; What is comparative religion?; The structure of the comparative study of religion; Scientific studies of religion; Religious studies and the comparative perspective; The study of religion as a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural presence among the human sciences; Comparative religion clichés; The political implications of religious studies. Part VI Religious Ethics: Gods, bliss and morality; The ethics of Chinese Communism; Clarity and imagination as Buddhist means to virtue; Religious values and the university; Sacred civilities; A global ethic arising from the epistemology of religious and similar value-systems. Appendices; Name index.
