In his obituary notice for Ninian Smart in The Independent (5 February 2001) Adrian Cunningham, a University of Lancaster colleague, justifiably claims that Smart 'was the single most important figure in the development of the subject [of Religious Studies] in British education'. Whereas in the 1950s, claims Cunningham, fewer than twenty persons in British universities and colleges taught or researched religions other than Christianity, now virtually every British college and university, in one way or another, includes not only Christian studies but Religious Studies generally. And that change, he maintains, is the result of Smart's creation of 'a new space for thinking about religion'.
There can be no question about Cunningham's claims regarding Smart's contribution to the revitalisation of the study of religion in Britain and beyond. The advertisement for the professorial post in the new department in the University of Lancaster permitted the candidate to be 'of any religion or none', a privilege that Smart extended to every student. In the late 1960s that constituted a radical approach to the study of religion because, as Brian Gates put it in his obituary notice in The Guardian (2 February 2001), it allowed Smart to challenge 'the intellectual hegemony of much contemporary theology'. But in challenging that hegemony, Smart did not take up a negative stance towards religion, even though he sought to provide a framework within which religion and religions constituted appropriate objects for detached, scientific analysis. For Smart, the study of religion in the context of the modern university demanded the same intellectual rigour that characterised all other academic deisciplines, yet did not demand either the espousal or the rejection of religion. This view provided considerable 'flexibility' in the 'new space for thinking about religion' which was very attractive to a wide range of students-devotees, agonistics and atheists. As Penelope Magee, a former student, put it in a biographical sketch for a set of essays published in Smart's honour, his appointment to the Lancaster post 'led to a tradition in scholarship and teaching which established Lancaster University as a major centre of the study of religion, attracting students from all over the world' (Aspects of Religion, eds. Peter Masefield and Donald Wiebe [New York, Peter Lang, 1994], p. 3).
It was Smart's conception of Religious Studies as an academic and scientific enterprise and, more particularly, his understanding of the role of philosophy of religion in that enterprise that attracted me to Lancaster. My interest at the time was focused on the apologetic value of the philosophy of religion, but I felt too confined by the more theological and Christian philosophical concerns that had dominated my doctoral studies at McMaster University. Although many scholars in religious studies eschewed philosophy of religion because it appeared to share its interest in questions of religious truth with theology, Smart, whose first teaching appointment was in philosophy at the University of Aberystwyth from 1952 to 1955, saw conceptual analysis as a basis on which to differentiate the philosophy of religion from theology. Such analysis is of *This tribute to Ninian Smart also appears in a more concise form in ARC, the Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University. I am grateful to the editors, James Mark Shields and Philip L. Tite, for allowing me to incorporate that material into this tribute in Religion.