{"id":15322,"date":"2017-01-01T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2017\/01\/01\/huston-smith-author-of-the-world-s-religions-dies-at-97\/"},"modified":"2017-01-01T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T12:00:00","slug":"huston-smith-author-of-the-world-s-religions-dies-at-97","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2017\/01\/01\/huston-smith-author-of-the-world-s-religions-dies-at-97\/","title":{"rendered":"Huston Smith, Author of &#8220;The World&#8217;s Religions,&#8221; Dies at 97"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/01\/us\/huston-smith-author-of-the-worlds-religions-dies-at-97.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, January 1, 2017 (New York Times): Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own enlightenment in Methodist churches, Zen monasteries and even Timothy Leary&#8217;s living room, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 97. Professor Smith was best known for &#8220;The Religions of Man&#8221; (1958), which has been a standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for half a century. In 1991, it was abridged and given the gender-neutral title &#8220;The World&#8217;s Religions.&#8221; The two versions together have sold more than three million copies.<\/p>\n<p>The book examines the world&#8217;s major faiths as well as those of indigenous peoples, observing that all express the Absolute, which is indescribable, and concluding with a kind of golden rule for mutual understanding and coexistence: &#8220;If, then, we are to be true to our own faith, we must attend to others when they speak, as deeply and as alertly as we hope they will attend to us.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Professor Smith, whose last teaching post was at the University of California, Berkeley, had an interest in religion that transcended the academic. In his joyful pursuit of enlightenment &#8212; to &#8220;turn our flashes of insight into abiding light,&#8221; as he put it &#8212; he meditated with Tibetan Buddhist monks, practiced yoga with Hindu holy men, whirled with ecstatic Sufi Islamic dervishes, chewed peyote with Mexican Indians and celebrated the Jewish Sabbath with a daughter who had converted to Judaism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, January 1, 2017 (New York Times): Huston Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}