![]() ![]() Smith sees our modern/postmodern work as a tunnel, with scientism as its floor, higher education and the law as its walls, and the media as its roof. This present work, written in a relaxed, almost garrulous style, explores what Smith sees as the root of our spiritual crisis: the traditional, spiritual view of humanity and the cosmos has suffered a loss of plausibility under the assaults of modernity (with its scientific cosmology) and a loss of moral authority under the assault of postmodernity’s “fairness revolution.” But modernity and postmodernity have their own problems-they are incapable of satisfying the hunger for meaning that is the strength of the traditional view, nor can they accommodate the spiritual experiences that people will always insist on having. Smith has had a long and distinguished career, and of late he has joined Joseph Campbell and Mortimer Adler in Bill Moyers’s PBS stable of wise and telegenic oldsters. ![]() ![]() Many Americans owe their first exposure to the study of comparative religion to Smith his The World’s Religions (originally The Religions of Man, 1958) is still among the most popular surveys in its field. A senior scholar of religion offers a cautiously optimistic look at the prospects for the spirit at the turn of the millennium. ![]()
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