"Sidelights"
Huston Smith was "one of the most productive and busiest scholars of religion in the world," to quote an Amazon.com interviewer. A highly visible expert on the world's religions, Smith was the author of The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions, which has been the standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for almost half a century. Smith was born to Methodist missionaries in China and has never ceased his affiliation with that particular church. Nevertheless, he practiced Buddhism, prayed five times a day in Arabic, and was fully conversant in Hindu rites as well. So well versed was he in the world's mystical and moral traditions that he was the subject of a five-part Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series, The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith. A Publishers Weekly contributor maintained that Smith's works are "marked by clarity, rare philosophical depth and a truly global perspective." Smith died on December 30, 2016, in Berkeley, California.
Smith was not a disinterested scholar who reported religious history without conviction but an ardent participant in faith-based practices and experienced mysticism as well. As a young professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, he ingested mind-altering substances with Timothy Leary before such elements became illegal. His own experiences while under their influence convinced him of the limited but real role "psychoactive sacraments" have played in the foundations and practices of certain world religions. This conviction prompted Smith to champion the rights of Native Americans to use peyote in their religious rites and led to the publication of such titles as One Nation under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church and Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. Christian Century correspondent Craig B. Mousin called One Nation under God "a moving testament to the resiliency of a people's faith in the midst of a culture whose laws and mores restrict faithful participation in its traditions." David O'Reilly in the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service noted that when Smith describes his experience with mescaline in Cleansing the Doors of Perception, he "seems to be describing the same wondrous encounter with the divine that mystics have sung of for millennia. And perhaps he was."
Smith has also been vocal on the cynicism of scientists who "deny the existence of things other than those they can train their instruments on," as quoted in Publishers Weekly. He feels that science and religion need not be mutually exclusive, as "traditional metaphysics" does not contradict objective facts. In an interview with Mother Jones, the scholar said: "I don't want to justify religion in terms of its benefits to us. I believe that, on balance, it does a lot of bad things too--a tremendous amount. But I don't think that the final justification of religion is the good it does for people. I think the final justification is that it's true, and truth takes priority over consequences. Religion helps us deal with what is most important to the human spirit: values,...