Smart, The Future of the Academy

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2000 PRESIDENTIALADDRESS

The Fuataire of the AcademyNinian Smart

This lecture has three parts. The first deals with the roots and formation ofthe m odern study of religion, especially in North America and Britain. Re-ligious studies is aspectual, cross-cultural, m ultidisciplinary, and nonfinite(i.e.,flowingbeyond religions to cover analogous embodied worldviews).The second part deals with the cutting edges in religious studies and thevarious theologies, notably through the rediscovery of the phenomenologyof religion, underpinned by a good general knowledge in thefield.The thirdpart suggests new ways of integrating religious studies, geographically andotherw ise, via confederal links between the American Academy of Religionand other learned societies. This will lead to global integration of the studyof religion. Also, our talents (especially, informed empathy) should be spreadmore widely and would be useful to a num ber of other professions. I con-clude with a paradox about belief in God or nirvana.

1I am going to do three things here. First, I am going to review the for-

mation of religious studies and theology, for these are the chief ingredientsof the intellectual life of the American Academy of Religion. Second, I amgoing to suggest some of the cutting edges of the study of religion, togetherwith some recommendations about the future of theology or rather of the-ologies. Third, I shall adumbrate some ways in which the academy ought todevelop.Ninian Smart was Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa BarbaraHe died suddenly in Lancaster, U.K , on 29 January 2001journal ofthe American Academy of Religion September 2001, Vol 69, No 3, pp 541-550. 2001 The Am erican Academy of Religion


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542 Journal of the American Academ y of ReligionReligious studies as we know it derives from the 1960s, though it hasroots and forebears of various kinds. I shall mention these later. I wasinvolved in setting up Britain's first Department of Religious Studies inthe University of Lancaster in 1967. In February of the following year Igave an outline description of the logic of the subject in my inaugural lec-ture . It was called "T he Principles and M eaning of the Study of Religion."I delineated it as being aspectual (that is, dealing with an aspect of hum anexperience and life), cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and nonfinite (thatis, it partly has to do with systems that have an analogy to religions, suchas East Germ an Marxism in the old days, likewise functioning as an "Es-tablished Church"). I still think this general description is valid, though

since that day the many disciplines involved include new ways of ap-proaching matters, such as feminism and, more generally, gender stud-ies, which have greatly enriched the field; film studies; and so on . Also,textual studies have changed, with the stronger emphasis on contextualapproaches. Incidentally, the nonfinite aspect of religious studies, incor-porating worldview analysis, was a forerunner of much in modern cul-tura l studies, as is implicit religion.At a similar time in the United States, following Schempp, the firstDepartments of Religious Studies were being set up in public universities.There were roots of such developments: there was comparative religion, anineteenth-cen tury creation; before that, David Hum e and others of the so-called Enlightenment; French research institutions; sociologists like Weber;textual studies of the Bible, the Upanishads, and the Pali Canon; an thro po-logical researches; and revived Asian cultures like those of India, Sri Lanka,China, and Japan (revived, that is, because of the potent, depressing, andyet stimulating challenge of colonialism). But the coming together of all thiswas in the sixties. You can see its evidence in the 1974 Encyclopedia Britan-nica, under the guidance of an intuitive person, Seymour Cain. Some might,of course, point to Mircea Eliade as a father of the field. But he, thoughlearned and innovative, had two serious weaknesses: he hated the socialsciences (though for my money religious studies is a global social science,among other things), and, second, he did not differentiate between ideol-ogy and, in the broader sense, description. His worldview was heavily dis-guisedyou had to know Romania sometimes to recognize it. But he wascertainly one of the roots of religious studies.

But the AAR includes many people who are more interested in theology,mainly Christian theology of various kinds. I happen to be an Anglican; andI had to undergo a fair amount of abuse in setting up religious studies in


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Smart- The Future of the Academy 543Lancaster even from Anglicans (but there were also many Christians whosupported me). I was told that you had to belong to understand. All depart-ments in universities were in theology. Theology was largely Anglican. Onlyone Roman Catholic taught (part-time) in our universities in Britain in 1967.Not a single person taught Judaism as a religion in British universities. So Ido n't talk against theology; bu t it should not be established. The fact is thatpower leads to irrational and biased decisions about knowledge.Theology ought to label itself as Christian, or Islamic, or Buddhist (de-spite the oxymoron), or Roman Catholic, or Shia. Then it would be respect-able in academia. I am serious. I wrote a book with a colleague, StevenKonstantine (of Bulgarian descent and an Orthodox Christian). But youshould have the elementary sense to know when you are expressing or ad-vocating your faith and when you are doing something more objective. Allthis is illustrated by that old joke: One man says to another, "Do you be-lieve in baptism?" The other replies, "Believe in itI've seen it done." Interms of my previous analysis of religious studies, theology deals with asegmental aspect; that is, it deals with (let us say) the Christian (or withinthat the Baptist or Catholic) segment. Or you might be dealing with theSunni or Shia segment of Islam. Part of theology deals with description, andpart deals with advocacy and expression (of the Methodist, or Shia, or PureLand, or Ramanuja's position, because they are believed in). So religiousstudies, as a scientific enterprise, overlaps with segmental theology and hasin the past benefited from biblical studies, Quranic studies, and so on.There remains, in this jigsaw, the place of philosophy of religion. Myfirst book, Reasons and Faiths [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958],not only was the first dissertation after World War II in Oxford in phi-losophy of religion but was the first after World War II to take religionseriously, I thought. In order to write it, I learned a lot of Pali, for Bud-dhism refuted so many western theories and analyses of religion. Any-way, it was a cross-cultural philosophy. I followed my guru, J. L. Austin,the discoverer of the performative, in thinking that the philosopher ofreligion ought to know about religions. Few philosophers do so: indeed,Gilbert Ryle, then dean of philosophy in Britain, once said to me (afterI'd published Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy [London: Allenand Unw in, 1964]), "I don 't know why you're so interested in Indian phi-losophy; nothing good philosophically came out of India." I replied, "Why,Gilbert, you must have read a lot to know that."

Anyway the philosophy of religion should be creatively cross-culturaland not cabined within narrow assumptions, largely western. Since the


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544 Journal of the American Academ y of Religionsixties religious studies has been very busy pouring out hund reds of mon o-graphs, and w hole new areas have been developed, from Eastern Europe,to Latin American religion, to Central Asia. Other areas are much morerichly developed than they were thirty years agofor instance, Chinesereligions. Though this is heartening, there has been a tendency to over-specialization. One can know all about Hinduism and neglect Buddhismand Islam, both important in the history of India.This tendency is caused in part by the m ass of new books published,partly by the weight of linguistic training insisted on in our graduateschools, partly by academic respectabilityborne out by one's a ttendanceboth at the AAR conven tion and at an area studies convention each yearand the need to publish intensely in one's specialty. These fragmentationsof the field are also found in the theologies and date a long way back inthe curricula of seminaries.Now I turn to the important areas of development, now and in the fu-ture. First, we need a rediscovery of the phenom enology of religion and bythe same token a recognition of the importance of comparison. Without itreligious studies is not a fruitful subject. As humans we have similar kindsof experience in differing cultures. This is not to deny that differences andparticularities are important. But as with noses, which have similar func-tions in different human beings though each person's nose is at the sametime unique , we can observe degrees of overlap between ideas and experi-ence in varied cultures. Or, more expansively, we can see that there are di-mensions of spirituality and organization in each religious tradition: thedimensions of myth and narrative, of ethics and law, of doctrine and phi-losophy, of experience and emotion, of social organization and influence,of ritual and practical expression, of material manifestation, and so on. Oryou could vary your assessment of these dimensions.Let me illustrate how phenomenology may have the effect of alteringyour perspective. If we assume that Paul was practicing a devotional formof religion in the life of prayer and worship that he commended, and ifwe see a strong overlap with the life of bhakti in medieval Hinduism, thenas in R amanuja, it helps to explain w hy both expressed a doctrine of grace.Of course, the particularities of Paul's devotion to Christ and of Ramanuja'sbackground in the Tamil poets and devotion to Visnu are very different;but even so there are striking similarities in the general outlines of theirtheologies.

Incidentally, our cross-cultural vocabulary could well be increased sothat we have the beginnings of a genuinely interna tional language. I havein the above example used bhakti virtually as an English word, like itscounterparts, karma, nirvana, and yoga, now English borrowings. Onecould add Tao, dharma, li (good or right behavior), and so forth.


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Smart: Th e Future of the Academy 545There is a shoal of coincidences and com binations in the world's reli-gions: this is not to say that overlaps are everywhere. Not every religionhas a supreme God: thus, Theravada Buddhism and Jainism do not, andmany small-scale religions do not. But Buddhism has a strong mysticaland contem plative content, as Christianity and Islam cam e to have. Any-way, the revival of efforts in phenomenology will restore the vision of ascientific approach to religious studies. It is a powerful complement tothe sociology of religion.Indeed, if sociology has a weakness, it is a lack of cross-cultural phe-nomenological depth, and though this is less true of anthropology, thehistory of anthropo logy has distorted its vision, too. W hen the three fields

of phenomenology, anthropology, and sociology are genuinely and sol-idly integrated, then a genuine advanced religious studies will be achieved.

The u nderpinn ing of comparative w ork is a general knowledge in thefield. I studied a whole variety of religions in the fifties in preparation formy graduate work in the history and ph ilosophy of religion. I believe tha tgraduate research ought to include a serious survey of the world's reli-gions and, more generally, of embodied worldviews, as well as the usualcourse in the history of the history of the subject and of theoretical ap-proaches. General knowledge is more important that any specialism. It isthe prerequisite of phenomenology.Next, we need a revival of the pursuit of objectivity. Relativism is aself-curing disease, though this has no t often been noticed. If you can showme that m y standpo int in delineating something is biased, then already Ihave the m eans to be more objective in my delineation. Of course, I real-ize that we are often subject to (often unrecognized) ignorances and bi-ases. But we can improve our track record. Indeed, that has been hap-pening from the time of Max M iiller and Chantepie de la Saussaye till thepresent.And we can learn from the best journalism and documentary mak-ing. W hen I was involved, with two others, in planning The Long Searchfor BBC television, I was delighted to discover how my then keen interestin the scientific study of religion corresponded closely to their generalpursuit of the truth about people. They had a poetic view of truth, in away, but that was appropriate: a science (as Aristotle said) should corre-spond in exactitude to its object. And in constructing a science of hum anbehavior, one has to use informed empathy. In knowing why Caesarcrossed the Rubicon you had to know a lot about the Roman Republic,Caesar's history and character, and so forth. You have to try to see and


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546 Journal of the American A cademy of Religionfeel the world from his standpoint. You have, as I say, to use informedempathy. It is impo rtant to have a fair and rounded view of what you areexamining.

Briefly, I think that the academy should learn a lot from the better kindof journalism and documentary: shall we say from the Pulitzer breed? Inthe same mold, we ought to be able to distinguish advocacy from descr ip-tion and analysis. There are those who think that religious studies is in-fected by theology. Perhaps it is, here and there: I think Eliade was so in-fected, as I have impliedhe had an ideology behind his phenom enology.I was one of the earliest to criticize him for this, during the early seven-ties. What I object to is not knowing (perhaps deliberately) metaphysicsfrom analysis, theology from phenomenology, ideology from informedempathy.Next, I turn to more substantive m atters. Religious studies may ben -efit from new discoveries and techniques in brain studies. For instance,the question of an underlying core of contemplative or mystical experi-ence may be partly settled by bra in physiology and the way the brain acts.Brain processes are also relevant to numinous experience, devotionalstates, shamanism, and other phenomena. We can coordinate brain knowl-edge with ways of approaching these experiences from reports and theliterature. This double enterprise needs a sound morphology of types ofexperience. The results of such an investigation will be relevant to theol-ogy (e.g., Christian theology), for if it reinforces the claim th at experiencesin differing traditions of a given type are like one another, it would besuggestive of and h ard to deny some spiritual truth in the othe r tradition .

Cosmology is very much flourishing these days, with Hubble andChandra and othe r m eans of gathering distant and fascinating data. Thisside of science would affect different species of theology more than reli-gious studies. For quite new perspectives open up with the enormousscope of the universe, together with the possibility that there are paralleluniverses. Physics nowadays goes into wild speculations. The question ofthe meaning of God's creation appears quite different in the period since1929, when Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding. And,of course, when you combine the en ormity of the cosmos with the no -tion of evolution, it raises the real question of the possibility of intelligentlife elsewhere. So theologies and religious doctrines might have to be re -vised to fit in with modern science. And also there are other thoughtsrelevant particularly to theology, such as the Gaia hypothesis.


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Smart The Future of the Academy 547

Let us return from outer space to deal with the history of human-kind . We have to get to grips with globalization. In 1987 I pub lished anarticle in the Festschrift Gilgul for Zwi Zerblowskyan early treatment,if not the first, of diasporas as a worldwide phenomenon, which trans-forms our treatment of the "home" tradition: for instance, the Sikhcommunities in Britain, North America, and so on; Hindu communi-ties in South Africa, Guyana, and so on; and Muslim communities inFrance, Britain, and so forth. T heir imp ortance may alter the dynamicsof the home tradition. Generally speaking, diasporas involve a criticalmass, that is, a certain density of migration, as with Hindus in Fiji andGuyana, and more scattered presence, as with H indu s in the U .S. Scat-tered diasporas are everywhere in the globalized world, and denser col-locations are the result mainly of empires and large dislocations of peo-ples due to warfare. Anyway, such diasporas are an integral part of thehistory of religion, large and small. In a global world nearly every na-tion is plural. This has created a new relationship between religionsand often friction.This has added to the phenomena of new religions, emerging notablyduring the colonial period. They can now be seen as a universal manifes-tation: we note the work of Eileen Barker, Diana Eck, G. Oosthuizen, andothers. They may originate in a given continen t bu t now migrate. That isan important aspect of our field.This also suggests a new geography of religion: greater Africa com-prising black Africa plus segments of North and South America; greaterIndia, comprising the subcontinent plus Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia(whose languages are no more divergent from Hindi than, say, Tam il andwhose culture likewise is suffused with Ind ian ideas); and greater China,comprising Singapore, parts of Indonesia, and Malaysia. We can see areverse diaspora, also, with the establishment of the State of Israel.It happens, too, that new areas are opening up to exploration: highlyimportant are Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, Russia and Siberia, andEastern Europe and the Balkans. These are fruitful fields of new develop-ment and are already emerging in the academy. I see in the future theconso lidation of these areas, together with regions that are a bit neglectedin the academy, such as Central and South America, the South Pacific,and Indonesia.We need a more logical arrangem ent of regions in the AAR. It is a bitcobbled toge ther, the present schematism, the result of groups and ad hocinitiatives, welcomed once but in need of revision.


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54 8 Journal of the American Academ y of ReligionI would also like to see a reappraisal of history in the academy. One ofits important aspects is that it reaches back when there were separate civi-lizations with minimal contact. Then comparisons could really meansom ething. Second, history will show ways in which religions change andevolve. There is still a tendency to unde restimate the degree to which giventraditions undergo often revolutionary transformations.Cultural studies may have relevance to religious studies, and, evenmore, vice versa. If religious studies is stretched in a nonfinite way intoworldview analysis, then we can discover overlaps between worldviewsand how they can and cannot be combined. This would define the out-lines of a global worldview and (hopefully) of tolerance. It would also help,

in an applied way, with the pursuit of mutual dialogues. It would be auseful philosophical service to come up with a map of the overlaps be-tween beliefs and where there are not conflicts.

I now apply this thought to theologies. It has been clear that becauseyou believe that everything in System A is true, everything in System B isfalse. But there may be overlaps. Moreover, you cannot rule ou t the thoughtthat you can learn from System B. We may all be able to learn somethingfrom every worldview. This is a basis for friendship between religions.Indeed, I think every form of theology ought to be in some degreeoutward looking and dialogical. I think teaching only your faith is immoraland garners absolutisms and often hatreds. There shou ld always be a com-parative aspect alongside the concern to unravel and express one's ownfaith. Especially, one should pay attention to the spiritual and moral val-ues of other faiths. We might follow the African Orthodox Church of JohnColtrane in San Francisco: it shares a building with the Lutherans andopens its heart to Hindu s, and Yoruba, and Buddhists, and atheists whilenot abandoning its own commitments and the social gospel.This is where general knowledge about religions is important for the -ologies as well as for religious studies. It is a duty , with its intrinsic empa-thy, at least to understand the Other.

8I now turn to the AAR as an institution and how it might develop. First,because of modern jet transport, an increasing number of Europeans,Africans, and others are joining in our annua l meetings. Further, there area lot of immigrants with green cards teaching religion and theologies on


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Smart: The Future of the Academ y 549our campuses and coming to the AAR. I proposed about ten years agoforming a Global Academy, but some feared it might be hegemonic (andI was only proposing that the AAR become a facilitator, with its immenseresources, relatively speaking). I was not trying to be an American impe-rialist. But as a result of my proposal, a Committee on International Con-nections is an established part of the academy. I think at least a federalstructure should be promoted: with the LAHR (International Associationfor the History of Religion), international sociological societies, and in-numerable national institutes and associations of scholars. The study ofreligion and religions is too important not to be pursued on a global ba-sis. It should not be left to hegemony by certain powers.

Also within N orth America it should n ot neglect natura l allies, like theAssociation for the Scientific S tudy of Religion; also, we may continue withour alliance with SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), and we should cul-tivate relations with other religious societiesJewish, Islamic, Buddhist,and so forth, provided these latter have a scholarly dimension.This kind of confederal alliance might be cumbersome. But I wouldfavor having a "federal strand" in ou r conven tions. Visitors from foreignand home institutions could present reports on their organizations' re-searches of interest to the academy. But ultimately I would like to see aGlobal Academ y, to give our profession a sense of solidarity. It could givea pluralistic sense of religious and philosophical theologies and world-views, compatible with a global and effective study of religion.I would like also to see a conference am ong members of the academyto work o ut a rational system of dividing up the world geographically andby traditions and, here and there, disciplines. This is not to negate ourrich pluralism but, rather, to take care of areas of the world that may beneglected or m isdescribed. Moreover, there should be more opp ortun ityfor all religions to express their theologies, even if it means cutting downon some microseminars.Further, I think some practical fruits of the AAR might be offered inand beyond the profession. I have stressed the importance of informedempathy in our field. It is something tha t m ight be stressed in schools andin professions that expose their practitioners to people from a variety ofreligious backgroundssuch as doctors, police officers, social workers,and nurses, not to mention teachers. We need to offer courses in theworld's religions and practical ways to understand them .

Finally, I shall make a curious point about God or nirvanaor whoor whatever. If you have an experience of God, it may affect you in vari-ous ways. You may come to believe in God; it has its empirical effects. Youmay become a highly loving person, or give up drink, or go to work in


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Smart, The Future of the Academy