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 NEW
BOOK: And
Live Rejoicing: Chapters from a Charmed Life: Personal Encounters with
Spiritual Mavericks, Remarkable Seekers, and the World's Great Religious
Leaders by Huston Smith and Phil CousineauReleased September 20112 Report from the Sagrada Bookstore Event
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 NEW
BOOK: Released March 26, 2012
The
Huston Smith Reader: "The most excitingly eye-opening . . . serious reading on religion many will feel they have ever encountered."--Booklist From the Inside Flap
"I read Huston Smith's The World's
Religions as a teenager. It was the most influential event in my
life. He has shaped my thinking, my lifelong quest, and guided me to
where I am today. The Huston Smith Reader will enlighten you,
delight you, and expand your awareness. I intend to carry this book
with me wherever I go."--Deepak Chopra, author of War of the
Worldviews
"Huston Smith approaches religion with the wisdom of a philosopher and the wonder of a child. He looks for similarities that unite, not differences that divide. He comes armed with knowledge and blessed with understanding."--Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club "This remarkable book by the beloved scholar-practitioner Huston Smith has the depth and breadth of no other. It is wise and full of insight, at times funny, at times poignant. Manifesting both lived and living wisdom, the book's power, beauty, and courage will take the reader into the heart of the world's religions."--Joan Halifax, Founding Abbot, Upaya Zen Center "No one in our time, neither Martin Buber nor Elie Wiesel, neither Karen Armstrong nor Simone Weil, has made a greater contribution to our understanding of religion and spirituality than Huston Smith. We are privileged to live in his era, not only for his books and films, but for his emphasis on gleaning the wisdom from ancient traditions, and the example he has afforded the rest of us in practicing what he preaches, thus illuminating for us what it means to have a lived-in philosophy of the religious life. In turn, this book affords us the widest and most penetrating range of insights yet published into the mind and heart of this great teacher."--Phil Cousineau, editor of The Way Things Are: Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life and author of The Art of Pilgrimage "Huston Smith's words serve me well in traversing my spiritual path."--Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now |
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Tales of Wonder
Winner: 2010 Nautilus Book Award in the category of Memoir/Personal Journey. Huston Smith, the man who brought the world's religions to the West, was born almost a century ago to missionary parents in China during the perilous rise of the Communist Party. Smith's lifelong spiritual journey brought him face-to-face with many of the people who shaped the twentieth century. His extraordinary travels around the globe have taken him to the world's holiest places, where he has practiced religion with many of the great spiritual leaders of our time. Smith's life is a story of uncanny synchronicity. He was there for pivotal moments in human history such as the founding of the United Nations and the student uprising at Tiananmen Square. As he traveled the world he encountered thinkers who shaped the twentieth century. He interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt on the radio; invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at an all-white university before the March on Washington; shared ideas with Thomas Merton on his last plane ride before Merton's death in Bangkok; and was rescued while lost in the Serengeti by Masai warriors who took him to the compound of world-renowned anthropologists Louis and Mary Leaky. In search of intellectual and spiritual treasures, Smith traveled to India to meet with Mother Teresa and befriended the Dalai Lama; he studied Zen at the most challenging monastery in Japan; and he hitchhiked through the desert to meet Aldous Huxley, dropped acid with Timothy Leary, and took peyote with a Native American shaman. He climbed Mount Athos, traipsed through the Holy Land, and was the first to study multiphonic chanting by monks in Tibet, which he recorded with Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Most important, he shared the world's religions with the West—writing two bestselling books and serving as the focus of a five-part PBS television series by Bill Moyers. Huston Smith is a national treasure. His life is an extraordinary adventure, and in his amazing Tales of Wonder, he invites you to come along to explore your own vistas of heart, mind, and soul.
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A Seat at the Table |
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The Soul of Christianity : Restoring the Great Tradition  Book Description (from Amazon.com)"I have tried to describe a Christianity which is fully compatible with everything we now know, and to indicate why Christians feel privileged to give their lives to it." -Huston Smith In his most personal and passionate book on the spiritual life, renowned author, scholar, and teacher of world religions Huston Smith turns to his own life-long religion, Christianity. With stories and personal anecdotes, Smith not only presents the basic beliefs and essential teachings of Christianity, but argues why religious belief matters in today's secular world. Though there is a wide variety of contemporary interpretations of Christianity -- some of them conflicting -- Smith cuts through these to describe Christianity's "Great Tradition," the common faith of the first millennium of believers, which is the trunk of the tree from which Christianity's many branches, twigs, and leaves have grown. This is not the exclusivist Christianity of strict fundamentalists, nor the liberal, watered-down Christianity practiced by many contemporary churchgoers. In exposing biblical literalism as unworkable as well as enumerating the mistakes of modern secularists, Smith presents the very soul of a real and substantive faith, one still relevant and worth believing in. Smith rails against the hijacked Christianity of politicians who exploit it for their own needs. He decries the exercise of business that widens the gap between rich and poor, and fears education has lost its sense of direction. For Smith, the media has become a business that sensationalizes news rather than broadening our understanding, and art and music have become commercial and shocking rather than enlightening. Smith reserves his harshest condemnation, however, for secular modernity, which has stemmed from the misreading of science -- the mistake of assuming that "absence of evidence" of a scientific nature is "evidence of absence." These mistakes have all but banished faith in transcendence and the Divine from mainstream culture and pushed it to the margins. Though the situation is grave, these modern misapprehensions can be corrected, says Smith, by reexamining the great tradition of Christianity's first millennium and reaping the lessons it holds for us today. This fresh examination of the Christian worldview, its history, and its major branches provides the deepest, most authentic vision of Christianity -- one that is both tolerant and substantial, traditional and relevant. |
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The World's Religions
--Michael
Joseph Gross
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The Illustrated World's Religions : A Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions
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The Way Things Are
From Publishers Weekly
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Why Religion Matters
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Cleansing the Doors of Perception
--Michael Joseph Gross
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Huston Smith: Essays on World Religion
From Publishers Weekly From Library Journal Ingram
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Buddhism : A Concise Introduction
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Forgotten Truth : The Common Vision of the World's Religions
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Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Smith begins by tracing the course of Western civilization that has brought
it to the postmodern period. This enables him to establish a vantage
point for viewing the Modern/Postmodern scene, and then to examine several
aspects of contemporary culture, such as science, theology, education,
and the humanities. In the final chapters, Smith offers suggestions for
moving out of the woods and into a twenty-first century that affirms
the ultimate truths of love, the human soul, and the Divine. With a new
preface and a new final chapter, this edition proves to be a guiding
light in a time of doubt.
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Islam: A Concise Introduction
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One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church
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The
World's Religions, by Huston Smith, has been a standard introduction
to its eponymous subject since its first publication in 1958. Smith
writes humbly, forswearing judgment on the validity of world religions.
His introduction asks, "How does it all sound from above? Like
bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange, ethereal harmony? ...
We cannot know. All we can do is try to listen carefully and with
full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.
Such listening defines the purpose of this book." His criteria
for inclusion and analysis of religions in this book are "relevance
to the modern mind" and "universality," and his interest
in each religion is more concerned with its principles than its context.
Therefore, he avoids cataloging the horrors and crimes of which religions
have been accused, and he attempts to show each "at their best." Yet
The World's Religions is no pollyannaish romp: "It is about
religion alive," Huston writes. "It calls the soul to the
highest adventure it can undertake, a proposed journey across the
jungles, peaks, and deserts of the human spirit. The call is to confront
reality." And by translating the voices of Hinduism, Buddhism,
Islam, Confucianism, Christianity, and Judaism, among others, Smith
has amplified the divine call for generations of readers. 
Retaining all the beloved qualities of Huston Smith's
classic The Religions of Man and the current fully revised and updated
The World's Religions, this stunning pictorial presentation refines
the text to its wonderful essentials. In detailed, absorbing, richly
illustrated, and highly readable chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism,
Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and primal religions, we find
refreshing and fascinating presentations of both the differences and
the similarities among the worldwide religious traditions.
Working with Phil
Cousineau, Smith has recently completed a collection
of over thirty interviews he has given over the last four decades.
This book will
reveal the roots of Smith's search for the fundamental mystical truths
at the heart of religion.
His
most recent book, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit
in an Age of Disbelief, offers a timely manifesto on
the ur gent need to restore the
role of religion as the primary humanizing force for individuals and society.
Weaving together insights from comparative religions, theology, philosophy,
science, and history, along with examples drawn from current
events and his own extraordinary
personal experience, Smith gives both a convincing historical and social critique
and a profound expression of hope for the spiritual condition of humanity.
Despite the widespread belief that these are halcyon days for
religion and spiritual
awareness, Smith shows how our everyday worldview is instead dominated by a
narrow scientism, materialism, and consumerism that push issues
of morality, meaning,
and truth to the outer margins of society and our lives. In fact, he finds
that too much of what passes as religion these days is actually
a privatized and ungrounded
debasement of true religion. 
Cleansing
the Doors of Perception is a fresh consideration of the age-old
relationship between certain psychoactive plants and chemicals and
mystical experience
by one of the most trustworthy religious writers of our time. Author
Huston Smith (most famous for his classic The World's Religions)
is the Walter Cronkite of religion scholars. He has long believed
that "drugs appear to be able to induce religious experiences" and
that "it is less evident that they can produce religious lives." At
the same time, he posits that "if ... religion cannot be equated
with religious experiences, neither can it long survive their absence." Therefore,
Smith's basic question about entheogens (a word he defines as "nonaddictive
mind-altering substances that are approached seriously and reverently")
is "whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith." Cleansing
the Doors does not offer one sustained argument in response to
that question. Instead, the book collects Smith's many articles
about
this subject, and connects them with brief introductory essays.
The writings gathered here range from personal testimony about
Smith's
own experience with entheogens to ethnographic work on the use
of entheogens in India. Throughout, Smith's style conveys the wisdom
and wonder that has guided his explorations of this strange, fascinating
aspect of religious experience. 
Marked by clarity, rare philosophical depth and a truly global perspective,
these 19 essays in comparative religion are filled with challenging
ideas and bold speculations. Smith ( The Religions of Man ) argues
that each of the world's three great civilizations has overspecialized--the
West in natural wisdom, China in social ethics, India in religious
psychology--with disastrous consequences for each culture. He looks
to Taoism for guidance in solving the ecological crisis, faults postmodernism
for its blindness to transcendent experience, and interprets Western
philosophy as a great religious enterprise fueled by a thrust toward
transcendence. On a more mundane level, Smith discusses spiritual
discipline in Zen, analyzes Tibetan lamas' chants and offers insights
on Japanese Shintoism, the Christian ecumenical movement, ancient
Vedic priests' imbibing of soma (possibly a psychedelic mushroom,
he concludes) and how to teach religion. These highly accessible
essays previously appeared in scholarly journals or books. 
From Publishers
Weekly
Ingram
"Rationalism
and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods," says
Huston Smith, "but a new metaphysics can rescue us." In this
new revised edition, Smith explores the "dark woods"—modernity—which
can be characterized by a loss of faith in transcendence. Through his
fourteen critically acclaimed essays, he invites us to step outside our
current Western outlook to see our worldview in perspective. He distinguishes
between the "traditional" worldview that placed God at the
center of the universe; the "modern" view in which science
ruled; and the "postmodern" view that doubts whether the universe
makes sense at all. 
Drawn from his masterful presentation
of Islam in the bestselling The World's Religions, Huston Smith offers
a highly readable and incisive
guide to the heart of a tradition with more than 1 billion adherents
worldwide. Dispelling narrow and distorted notions about the nature
of Islam, Smith shows the rich history, culture, and values that sustain
this vibrant tradition. As Huston points out, Islam itself means primarily "peace," and
its full connotation is "the peace that comes when one's life
is surrendered to God." Featuring a new introduction for these
troubled times, the book covers not only the history and teachings,
but also such timely issues as the true meaning ofjihad, the role of
women in Islamic societies, and the remarkable growth of Islam in America.
This book will stand apart as the least expensive and most concise,
timely, and reliable introduction available today. 
The evolution and changes of the Native American Church are traced
in a fine documentary which charts its struggle to preserve its religious
freedom in the face of government challenges to its existence. Personal
accounts by church members pepper this history and documentation of
the Church's traditions and controversial rituals.