Huston Smith – författare

In honor of its 50th anniversary comes a special edition of Huston Smith's masterpiece "The World's Religions", the classic exploration of the essential elements and teachings of the world's predominant faiths. Emphasizing the inner - rather than the institutional - dimensions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Smith devotes special attention to Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, indigenous religions and the teachings of Jesus. He convincingly conveys the unique appeal and gifts of each of the traditions and reveals their hold on the human heart and imagination. This special 'plus' edition will include an essay by Smith which provides an overview of his life spent 'Exploring the World's Religious Frontiers'.

A concise and up-to-date guide to the history, teachings, and practice of Buddhism by two luminaries in the field of world religions.

Huston Smith has had the habit of showing up in the most remarkable places at the most historic times. This autobiography tells the story of Smith's experiences of historic turning points and encounters with many of the people that shaped the 20th century. In addition to the figures above, Smith tells stories of his very personal interactions with, to name a few: Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Thomas Merton, Reinhold Niebuhr, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, John Kenneth Galbraith, Noam Chomsky, Robert Graves, Saul Bellow, Pete Seger, and Bill Moyers. Smith has lived an amazing life, and his great stories of adventure and wonder serve as a travelogue, a popular history of a century of monumental changes, and an inspirational memoir.

In this collection of illuminating conversations, renowned historian of world religions Huston Smith invites ten influential American Indian spiritual and political leaders to talk about their five-hundred-year struggle for religious freedom. Their intimate, impassioned dialogues yield profound insights into one of the most striking cases of tragic irony in history: the country that prides itself on religious freedom has resolutely denied those same rights to its own indigenous people. With remarkable erudition and curiosity - and respectfully framing his questions in light of the revelation that his discovery of Native American religion helped him round out his views of the world's religions--Smith skillfully helps reveal the depth of the speakers' knowledge and experience. American Indian leaders Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Winona LaDuke (Anishshinaabeg), Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Frank Dayish, Jr.(Navajo), Charlotte Black Elk (Oglala Lakota), Douglas George-Kanentiio (Mohawk-Iroquois), Lenny Foster (Dine/Navajo), Tonya Gonnella Frichner (Onondaga), Anthony Guy Lopez (Lakota-Sioux), and Oren Lyons (Onondaga) provide an impressive overview of the critical issues facing the Native American community today. Their ideas about spirituality, politics, relations with the U.S. government, their place in American society, and the continuing vitality of their communities give voice to a population that is all too often ignored in contemporary discourse. The culture they describe is not a relic of the past, nor a historical curiosity, but a living tradition that continues to shape Native American lives.

For more than sixty years, Huston Smith has not only written and taught about the world's religions, he has lived them. This Reader presents a rich selection of Smith's writings, covering six decades of inquiry and exploration, and ranging from scholarship to memoir. Over his long academic career, Smith's tireless enthusiasm for religious ideas has offered readers both in and outside the academy a fresh understanding of what religion is and what makes it meaningful. "The Huston Smith Reader" offers a comprehensive guide to understanding religion and spirituality as well as a memorable record of Huston Smith's lifelong endeavor to enrich the inner lives of his fellow humans.

In this provocative volume two important scholars of religion, Huston Smith and Henry Rosemont, Jr., put forth their viewpoints and share a probing conversation. Though the two diverge considerably in their accounts of religious faith and practice, they also agree on fundamental points. Huston Smith, author of the important work The World’s Religions, has long argued for the fundamental equality of the world’s religions. Describing a “universal grammar of religion,” he argues that fourteen points of similarity exist among all of the major religious traditions and that these similarities indicate an innate psychological affinity for religion within the human spirit. As Noam Chomsky has argued that humans are hardwired to use language, Smith similarly argues that humans are hardwired for religious experience. In response, Rosemont explicates his humanistic vision of the world, in which the “homoversal” tendency to contemplate the infinite is part of our co-humanity that endures across time, space, language, and culture. Rosemont also elaborates upon Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and its relevance to Smith’s ideas about the similarities among religions. This insightful exploration of the most essential basis of religion provides a new direction for comparative-religion scholars everywhere.

Proposes religious philosophies to succeed the waning worldview of modernity.In this book, Huston Smith and David Ray Griffin propose religious philosophies to succeed the waning worldview of modernity. Huston Smith proposes the perennial philosophy or primordial tradition, and David Ray Griffin offers postmodern process theology. The ultimate issue debated is whether we should return to a traditional religious philosophy or seek a new never-before-articulated worldview.The debate covers the following issues: the relation of Christianity to other religions; the ultimate reality of a personal God in relation to a transpersonal absolute; the ultimate reality of time and progress; the problem of evil; the nature of immortality; the relation of humans to nature; the relation of science to theology; the relation of upward to downward causation; and the possibility of nonrelativistic criteria for deciding between competing worldviews.