Huston Smith, looking back over his 81 years on earth, feels grateful to his parents for the inheritance that they passed on to him. This inheritance was not money, but faith.

They were Methodist missionaries in China; there they brought up their son who would become one of this country’s foremost scholars of world religions. Through his appearances on public television, especially in a five-part program produced by Bill Moyers in 1996, Huston Smith has become well known to the many Americans to whom religion speaks meaningfully.

Now retired, Huston Smith continues to write about faith, religion, spirituality, and their importance for people of our time. Last week in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to talk with this man of insight and feeling. Looking into his deeply sympathetic face, I felt myself in the presence of someone who appreciates the splendor of human life and the mystery that surrounds it.

He summarizes the personal faith received from his parents in two simple sentences. We are in good hands. In gratitude for what we have received, we should bear one another’s burdens.

Of the inheritance from his parents he writes: “On coming to America for college, I brought that faith with me, and the rest of my life has been a struggle to keep it intact in the face of the modern winds of doctrine that assail it.”

This quotation comes from his most recent book “Why Religion Matters.” There he presents religion as a necessary way of understanding human identity and the meaning of the world.

Professor Smith knows about the modern winds of doctrine at first hand. During his long career he has taught at Washington University in St. Louis, M.I.T., Syracuse, and the  University of California at Berkeley. In academia, he had constant contact with ideologies quite closed to spiritual reality and dead to the legacy left by the great religious traditions of the world.

Professor Smith does not fail to admire science and the technology that has transformed the way modern people live. But he insists that science cannot answer the great “why” questions such as those asked by the French painter Paul Gaugin in one of his most celebrated pieces of art: “Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?”

Science, for all its wondrous achievements, cannot speak to “the basic longing that lies in the depths of the human heart.” That longing finds a response in the great religious traditions of the world, traditions that Professor Smith has devoted his life to studying.

Though most people do not see it, he believes that the modern world remains in deep crisis. “Giving a blank check to science” is the prime cause of this crisis, he says. Instead of recognizing that scientists cannot answer the “why” questions, our contemporaries expect them to know everything or, at least, be on the way to universal knowledge.

Going against the views of many Americans, especially young people, Huston Smith does not feel that spirituality by itself is the answer. “I am waging a one-man war against spirituality nosing out religion and turning it into a pejorative,” he told me with passion in his voice.

He knows and understands the criticisms people make about religion, its dogmatism and moralistic approach to life, telling you what not to do. But, he says, “I argue with them.”

“Religion is organized spirituality,” he explains. “As such, it takes on the burden of all the shadow side of the institution.”  

But, if there were no religious institutions you would not have the great treasures of spirituality, he argues. The Sermon on the Mount of Jesus and the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha would both have been quickly lost unless they were carried down over thousands of years by institutions.

What is likely to happen to the major organized religions in the twenty-first century, I asked. Professor Smith sees them as coming closer to one another in our global society. However, for those in the West, at least, they will have to come to grips with the question of their relationship to science.

These religious traditions must convince people that science does not have all the answers. The way science views the world is incomplete and requires religion to reveal a deeper reality.

Richard Griffin