Profile: Huston Smith

This month on UMC.org Profiles, Huston Smith – author, scholar, and philosopher – shares his faith story.

Huston Smith is one of the today’s foremost authorities on the world’s great religions.  In 1996, Smith was the focus of a Bill Moyers 5-part PBS special called The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith, which chronicled his life and work studying the world’s religions. Smith is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Syracuse University.  For fifteen years, he served as Professor of Philosophy at M.I.T., and prior to that taught at Washington University in St. Louis.  Most recently, he served as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Smith holds twelve honorary degrees, and has written fourteen books, including Why Religion Matters and The World’s Religions, which is one of the most widely used college textbooks on comparative religion.  His most recent book is The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition.  Throughout all of his studies on the world’s great religions, Smith has remained a United Methodist.