Huston Smith

Huston Smith, the author of the classic bestseller The World's Religions, delivers a passionate, timely message: The human spirit is being suffocated by the dominant materialistic worldview of our times. Smith champions a society in which religion is once again treasured and authentically practiced as the vital source of human wisdom.

The World's Religions, by beloved author and pioneering professor Huston Smith (Tales of Wonder), is the definitive classic for introducing the essential elements and teachings of the world's predominant faiths, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as regional native traditions. This revised and updated edition provides sympathetic descriptions of the various traditions, explaining how they work...

The world's premier authority on religious traditions presents a concise and timely guide to the history, teachings, and practice of Islam. Drawn from his masterful presentation of Islam in the bestselling book The World's Religions (over two million copies sold), Huston Smith offers a revealing look into the heart of a tradition with more than one billion adherents worldwide. Dispelling narrow and distorted notions about the nature of Islam and featuring...

Spiritual trailblazer Huston Smith has written comprehensive books about religion and a memoir of his own life, but nowhere has he merged the two elements of seeking and experience with such storytelling flair as he has in these pages. Few have done as much as Smith to explore and illuminate the world's religions and spiritual traditions, and none have done it with such accessibility, wonder, and delight. In this joyous volume, he looks back on his...

Huston Smith, the man who brought the world's religions to the West, was born almost a century ago to missionary parents in China during the perilous rise of the Communist Party. Smith's lifelong spiritual journey brought him face-to-face with many of the people who shaped the twentieth century. His extraordinary travels around the globe have taken him to the world's holiest places, where he has practiced religion with many of the great spiritual...

The life of Huston Smith reads like an adventure novel. One of the foremost religious scholars of our time, Smith lived in a missionary household in China, monasteries in Japan, and a sweat lodge in North America. Introduced to Vedanta through spiritual pioneers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, he engaged many of the contemporary wisdom giants.

Westerners look to science to explain the way things are. Yet science often overlooks something essential to life: the human spirit. Although spirit cannot possibly be seen through the lens of a microscope, captured on a video camera or explained through scientific experiments, few of us would deny that it exists. Huston Smith breathes new life into our search for truth.

Who are we? Why are we here? How should we spend our few precious years on Earth? Throughout history, we've looked to religion for answers to our deepest, abiding questions. One of the foremost scholars of religion in the world, Huston Smith, discusses the contemporary role of religion, the value religion continues to provide for those who choose to listen, the difference between religion and spirituality, and the commonalities of various religions....