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Document Type
Video
Interview Date
2-16-1999
Abstract
Who most influenced your approach to the study of religion?
Dr. Ninian Smart discusses who has most influenced his approach to the study of religion. Rudolf Otto, a German theologian who wrote The Idea of the Holy, had a significant impact on Dr. Smart’s scholarship. He was familiar with R.C. Zaehner’s work, but considered him to be too pious. Dr Smart goes on to say that early in his studies when he was studying philosophy, Karl Popper and his idea of an open society was also influential because it gave him a strong sense of the liberal nature of today’s world.
Recommended Citation
Smart, Ninian and Benney, Alfred. Created by Alfred Benney. "Dr. Ninian Smart Engages with the Question: Who Most Influenced Your Approach to the Study of Religion?" February 1999. DigitalCommons@Fairfield. Web. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/asrvideos/307
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Playing Time: 3:24
About the Interviewee:
Dr. Ninian Smart was educated at Glasgow University and at Queen’s College, Oxford. He held teaching appointments at Yale University, London University, Banaras Hindu University and Birmingham University. He became the founding Professor of Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 1967 and in 1976 he came to the University of California at Santa Barbara as the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions and spent part of each year at that institution and at Lancaster University until his retirement from Lancaster in 1982.
A prolific author/lecturer, his book The World’s Religions (1989) reached a considerable popular readership. He pioneered the defense of religious studies as a secular discipline which helped the formation of departments in many public universities, especially in the United States. During his life-time of scholarship, he held the presidencies of major learned societies in the study of religions, notably the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional society for Religious Studies in the Americas. Dr. Smart died in his native England in 2001.
About the Interviewer:
Dr. Alfred Benney is a professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. He has a Ph.D in Theology from the Hartford Seminary Foundation and teaches courses in Non-Traditional American Religions and Christian Religious Thought. His research interests include "how people learn"; "the appropriate use of technology in teaching/learning" and "myth as explanatory narrative". He has published work on teaching with technology.