Professor Smart came to the University of California at Santa Barbara some years after I had graduated with my Ph.D., so I knew him as a senior collegue rather than as a graduate student. Nevertheless, I felt that I was a student of his remarkable learning and analytical ability in relation to what he called 'World Views'. He made religious studies more than an academic discipline. It was a way of understanding life. He also treated me as one of his own students because I had been at UCSB before teaching at Cal Poly.
I was privileged to get acquainted with Ninian because he was gracious enough to come several times to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, to be a guest lecturer in our Culture of India lecture series and on other occasions. He was able to interest Cal Poly students in the conflict between the Hindus and Buddhists in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. This was a remarkable feat at a polytechnic university.
I was impressed not only with Ninian's immense range of learning in all aspects of religion but also with his ability to apply analytic methods of philosophy to the study of religion. He, more than anyone else, demonstrated to certain philosophers that religious studies is not 'theology' and that the proper study of religion requires more tools than perhaps even they have acquired.
Ninian once confined to my late husband, a retired US Navy Captain, and me that his initials RNS were actually for 'Royal Naval Service' because his father had so admired it. However, he was never to be called 'Roderick'. He was too lighthearted for that. He knew more amusing limericks and jokes than anyone else I ever knew. They cannot be repeated here, but I can remember how amused we all were at receptions, in elevators, in hallways and wherever else we encountered Ninian. He was a charmer, and such a nice man. He carried his brilliance so graciously.