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Roderick Ninian Smart (6 May 1927 – 9 January 2001) was a Scottish writer and university educator. He was a pioneer in the field of secular religious studies. In 1967 he established the first department of religious studies in the United Kingdom at the new University of Lancaster where he was also Pro-Vice-Chancellor, having already chaired one of the largest and most prestigious departments of theology in Britain at the University of Birmingham. In 1976, he became the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions at University of California, Santa Barbara. Smart presented the Gifford Lectures in 1979–80. In 1996, he was named the Academic Senate's Research Professor, the highest professorial rank at UC Santa Barbara. In 2000, he was elected President of the American Academy of Religion, while simultaneously retaining his status as President of the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace. Smart held both titles at the time of his death. Smart became widely known outside the Academy, at least in Britain, when he was editorial consultant for the major BBC television series, The Long Search (1977). His book ''The World's Religions'' (1989) also reached a considerable popular readership. His defence of religious studies as a secular discipline helped the formation of departments in many public universities, especially in the United States. He distanced religious studies from traditional theology in that evaluating truth claims and apology have no role but regarded investigation into the "truth and worth" of religion ''per se'' as a valid academic enterprise in the public arena of state-funded education. ==Early life== Ninian Smart was born in Cambridge, England, where his father, William Marshall Smart (1889–1975) was the John Couch Adams Astronomer in the University of Cambridge. His mother was Isabel (née Carswell). W. M Smart, who died in 1975, also served as President of the Royal Astronomical Society (1950). Both parents were Scottish. They moved to Glasgow in 1937, when W. M. Smart became Regius Professor of Astronomy (retiring in 1959). Smart was one of three brothers, all of whom became professors: Jack (1920–2012) became a professor of philosophy; Alastair (1922–1992) was Professor of Art History at Nottingham University. Smart attended the Glasgow Academy before joining the military in 1945, serving until 1948, in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he learned Chinese (via Confucian texts) mainly at the London School of Oriental and African Studies and had his first extended contact with Sri Lankan Buddhism. It was this experience that roused him from what he called his "Western slumber with the call of diverse and noble cultures." Leaving the army – as a captain – with a scholarship to Queen's College, University of Oxford, he reverted to his Glasgow major, classics and philosophy, mainly because Chinese and Oriental studies in those days had "pathetic curricula". However, for his B.Phil. work he returned to world religions, writing what he later described as "the first dissertation in Oxford on philosophy of religion after World War II". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ninian Smart」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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