both marveled at and envied the ability Ninian seemed to have to sit down anywhere and produce scholarship. Ninian certainly had a great deal to say, as witnessed by his prolific output, and his thoughts often appeared to flow almost effortlessly from his pen. He took great pleasure in doing academic work, and for him scholarship and enjoyment were quite compatible. He once told me that he liked to work outside and would often write while sitting on his deck at his California home, enjoying the sun. Indeed, at Santa Barbara he was known for always sporting a deep tan. He could even produce scholarly writing on planes.
Ninian reported that he could sleep well on planes, too. I mean really sleep-that uninterrupted stretch of seven or eight hours of rest that we all would love to get on long flights but that most of us find elusive. On the several lengthy trips I have taken from the United States to India, where I have done much of my own scholarly research in the last several years, I always arrive exhausted and red-eyed, counting myself lucky to have gotten two or three hours of sleep in the previous twenty-four. But Ninian claimed he could slumber long and peacefully at thirty thousand feet, arriving at his destination fresh, alert and rested. He had plenty of practice, of course. He traveled frequently from California to England and Italy, where he had homes. But he was also constantly on the go, lecturing at universities all over the world, and he seemed to have friends and colleagues just about everywhere. I remember one occasion when I ran into him in the office of the Religious Studies Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara and asked him if he had had a nice weekend. Yes, he told me, it had been fine: he had been in Hong Kong. On another occasion he was off to Japan; still another, to South Africa. He traveled more than anyone else I have ever known, and at a pace that many of us would find exhausting. But the travel didn't seem to tire Ninian. Indeed, he seemed to thrive on it. The world was his home, and he seemed at home just about anywhere in it.
Ninian was a globetrotter intellectually as well, and in his academic work he took pains to adopt a consistently global perspective. His approach to the study of religion favoured broad comparison, and he was committed to an exploration of religion that would not privilege the categories of any one tradition. Ninian's work has sometimes been criticised for being too broad, the kind of work that sacrifices depth for breadth. But there was a point to Ninian's approach, for thinking broadly means thinking inclusively, and Ninian was an inclusive kind of person. His approach to the study of religion matched his approach to people: democratic, open-minded, non-discriminatory and just, and his insistence on broad comparison exemplified his deep sense of fair play. Indeed, Ninian's commitment to the comparative study of religion has always seemed to me to be a moral stance as much as an intellectual one. His approach insists that one give consideration to not only one's own religious commitments but also those to which one might feel no personal allegiance. And in a field dominated by Christian assumptions, Ninian explicitly refused to privilege Christian categories or apply them uncritically to religions other than Christianity. His use of multiple 'dimensions' to religion strives to